Oklahoma Hit by Earthquake
November 6, 2011
Oklahoma Hit by Earthquake for a Second Night in a Row
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
For the second night in a row, an earthquake rattled Central Oklahoma late Saturday night, waking residents, breaking dishes and generally startling people more accustomed to natural disasters from above than from below their feet.
The quake, which the United States Geological Survey said had a preliminary magnitude of 5.6, occurred about 10:53 p.m. and was centered near Sparks, Okla., a town of 137 people about 45 miles east of Oklahoma City.
Justin Reese, manager of the Boomarang Diner in nearby Chandler, Okla., the seat of Lincoln County, said the shaking went on for about a minute and 40 seconds. He said that there was some damage but that it was too dark to say how much.
“It was scary,” said Mr. Reese, who added that Oklahomans “were not used to something like that.”
Neither the police department nor the fire department in Chandler reported any emergencies related to the quake. The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department reported some structural and road damage.
A woman’s answering the dispatcher’s line at the sheriff’s department said some boulders had broken free in the county. She described them as “rocks the size of cars.” No injuries were reported, The Associated Press said.
The United States Geological Survey said that the quake was a shallow one, about three miles deep, and that the epicenter was four miles east of Sparks.
“You could feel it coming through the ground, and the walls started vibrating,” Mr. Reese said. “It rolled kind of just like a boat or a ship would roll underneath your feet.”
In the diner’s kitchen, several large galleys were knocked over, he said, and “we had a lot of breakage from plates.”
The quake was most intense for about 40 seconds, when “it was really lifting and moving things,” he said. “The next 60 seconds everything was just vibrating.”
The earthquake on Saturday followed a smaller one reported that day at 2:12 a.m. that was felt in neighboring states. Its epicenter was in Prague, Okla., about 50 miles east of Oklahoma City.
Mr. Reese, reached by phone early Sunday, said there were some “major cracks through the brick” of the Lincoln County Courthouse after the first quake.
“Tornadoes, we have a warning of,” he said. “These we have no warning; this is a total surprise.”
Oklahoma Geological Survey researcher Austin Holland told the Oklahoma City television station KOTV that the earthquake and aftershocks occurred on a known fault line, The A.P. said, adding that residents in Prague and Sparks felt an intense shaking.