The biggest earthquake in Oklahoma history struck Saturday night at nearly 11 p.m. With a magnitude of 5.6, the quake brought 17 aftershocks, lasting into Sunday morning. According to geophysicist Jessica Turner at the U.S. Geological Survey, the original quake could be felt not only in Oklahoma, but in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, northern Texas and some parts of Illinois and Wisconsin.
Many students felt a light tremor locally, but one in particular felt the quake, as she was in Oklahoma at the time.
Sophomore Sydney Wendt was attending a gymnastics clinic in Tulsa and was in a hotel room with a friend when the quake hit.
“It just suddenly happened,” Wendt said. “I was sitting on the bed and all of a sudden the lamps started shaking and the walls started shaking and the bed started moving up and down.”
Although the quake was somewhat strong, there were no fatalities or serious injuries reported.
“There was no damage to the city that I saw,” Wendt said.
The earthquake was originally charted as a 5.2, but was updated to a 5.6 on the Richter scale after the intensity increased.
“I actually wasn’t really scared,” Wendt said. “It was really cool because it was the first earthquake I had ever been in!”
The Oklahoma quake reached the school district here as well. Many students felt a slight shaking on Saturday night.
“I was in my room and I could hear this weird shaking noise,” senior Richard Lyne said. “There was a big crash and a pile of movies on my TV fell off. It was weird because I had just been talking about Paranormal Activity and my first thought was that the room was haunted!”
Aside from supernatural suspicions, the earthquake didn’t rock anybody’s world.
“I didn’t even know it was an earthquake until later that night,” Lyne said.
Although it did not have a huge impact here, social networking sites spread awareness of the earthquake’s occurrence.
“I didn’t even hear about the earthquake until I got on Facebook,” sophomore Molly Irwin said. “My entire wall was covered with posts about it, but I didn’t even feel it.”
