MADISON, Ohio — We’re less than a week into 2024 and already, Madison Village has been rattled by two earthquakes. The first happened New Year’s Day. The second followed Friday morning. It’s not the first time this region felt the Earth move under their feet. But the two-fer this week has people who live there, like Terri Epple, wondering what’s up.
“The whole house just rattled and shook, and I said, ‘It’s another earthquake,’” she told News 5 anchor Katie Ussin. “We’ve been having them quite often out here."
Epple didn’t feel the 2.6 magnitude earthquake Friday morning. But she did feel the 2.4 earthquake near the same area on New Year’s Day. She and her husband were at the dinner table working on a puzzle when it hit.
“I don’t want my house to fall down! It’s old and I’m worried about cracks in the foundation and the neighborhood because there are a lot of older things here in Madison and it worries you,” she said.
Madison Fire District Chief Brian Faulhammer told Ussin there were no reports of damage, but these small quakes are the talk of the town.
“Oh yeah, everybody keeps asking why they keep happening,” he said. “They seem to be coming more in frequency. Is it leading up to something or is something going on? And we’ve yet to determine that.”
Katie also spoke with Will Yeck, a seismologist from the US Geological Survey.
“I don’t think this particular event is alarming or anything,” he said. “This is just the kind of typical behavior that we’ve seen in the past few years.”
Yeck said there are earthquakes we never feel happening across the country every day, mostly in areas where there are active plate boundaries like California or Alaska. So, it is noteworthy when they happen away from those plate boundaries in areas like Northeast Ohio.
“Typically, the thought is that these are related to weakened faults in the crust that end up slipping more often,” he said.
Jim Van Orman is a professor at Case Western Reserve University who specializes in deep Earth processes. He told Katie there are a lot of those little faults, or fractures in the Earth’s basement rocks, about a mile deep, that seem to be clustered east of Cleveland. It’s just where they happened to be produced one billion years ago, and Van Orman said there’s no cause for alarm.
“There aren’t trends with things like weather or time of year," he said. "These are really deep events that don’t have anything to do with what’s happening at the surface.”
Both Yeck and Van Orman mentioned Northeast Ohio’s largest magnitude earthquake, a 5.0 temblor that hit Lake County in 1986. While these experts say we can’t predict earthquakes, we can be prepared.
“It’s always good to have an idea of preparedness,” said Yeck. You can find instructions on how to be ready for a natural disaster here.
The USGS said it received 17 reports from the Madison area for both of this week’s small quakes. If you felt anything, you can fill out a report here to help the agency compile more data.
