Published: April 18, 2008 10:24 am      

Quake shakes up residents

5.2 temblor hits Midwest

DANVILLE — The phones at the Public Safety Building started lighting up just seconds after local residents awoke early this morning to an earthquake.

Tracey Taylor, a dispatcher at the Public Safety Building 911 Center, said it took only about 30 seconds for the calls to start coming in.

“People wanted to know what was going on,” Taylor said. “At that point, we didn’t know for sure.”

It didn’t take long for confirmation of what many already guessed they’d felt.

The quake struck at 4:36 a.m. CST this morning with a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale. No damages or injuries were reported.

The quake was centered 6 miles from West Salem, Ill., and 66 miles west of Evansville, Ind.

According to the Associated Press, a woman in Mount Carmel, 15 miles southeast of the epicenter, was trapped in her home by a collapsed porch. She was quickly freed and wasn’t hurt.

The department took numerous other calls, though none reported anything more serious than objects knocked off walls and out of shelves, she said.

The quake shook skyscrapers in Chicago’s Loop, 230 miles north of the epicenter, and in downtown Indianapolis, about 160 miles northeast of the epicenter.

Residents in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis also reported feeling the earth shake.

Vermilion County EMA Director Ted Fisher said this morning no damage reports had been received.

Mark Craven, Vermilion County superintendent of building and grounds, began inspections that included the Courthouse Annex, Bresee Tower and the county’s Animal Regulation Center. Vermilion Manor Nursing Home has its own set of inspectors.

“It’s just me and one other (man),” Craven said. “It will take us all day. It’s a lot of area to cover, a lot of nuances.

“There haven’t been any reports of damage so far.”

Provena United Samaritans Medical Center spokesperson Gretchen Wesner said the earthquake had a minimal impact on the hospital and none on patient care.

“All we had were some minor electrical disruptions,” Wesner said. “The elevators and fire doors were briefly affected.”

Area residents seemed to take the earthquake in stride.

Rick Moore woke up in his Bismarck mobile home when things started shaking.

“The walls were moving back and forth,” Moore said. “I thought it was a strong wind.

“Then I heard the scanner going, and I knew what it had to be,” he said. “I didn’t go back to sleep.”

Moore remembered another earthquake in the area and didn’t think this one was as bad. He was playing baseball in 1998 or 1999 at Danville Stadium with the Blue Jays, the previous name for the Danville Dans.

“I remember the stadium walls were shaking,” he said.

Greg Green, who lives just off Indiana Route 63 near Covington, Ind., also had some prior earthquake experience.

“I heard my dishes rattling in the cabinet,” Green said. “I saw the water jostling in my aquarium — it was a little bit of a rough ride for the fish.

“I experienced (an earthquake) in 1992 in California,”

Green said. “This one couldn't compare to that, but they were both a bit unnerving.”

The Associated Press reported that the Midwest, most notably southeast Missouri and southwest Illinois, is home to the New Madrid fault, a network of deep cracks in the earth’s surface.

The fault, at the center of the country’s most active seismic zone east of the Rockies, produces numerous small quakes a year, most too weak to be noticed by the public.

Even before today, earthquakes — or the possibility of them — in the central United States were getting plenty of attention.

On May 6 and 7, agriculture extension officials from various regional states already are scheduled to convene an earthquake summit, hosted by the University of Illinois’ extension service. Planners of the New Madrid Earthquake Emergency Prepared-ness Conference in the Ohio River community of Metropolis say representatives from Illinois, Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri and Tennessee are to attend.