Locals react to 3.4 magnitude earthquake near Elgin

[ad_1]

ELGIN, SC (WIS) – What scientists say is a rare earthquake swarm in the Midlands continued this weekend when a 3.4 magnitude earthquake centered near Elgin jolted thousands out of a sound sleep.

The earthquake hit around 1:30 AM Sunday. It was followed by several smaller earthquakes, or aftershocks, in the same area.

According to the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, there have now been more than 30 earthquakes near Elgin since Christmas.

A 3.3 magnitude earthquake rumbled through the Midlands on May 9.

Many who live where these earthquakes are centered say this is quite jarring, especially when it happens in the middle of the night.

“It is terrible to feel something shaking you and you don’t know what it is,” Carmen L. Jackson, who lives near the earthquake’s epicenter, said. “I mean you’re in the bed and the bed’s shaking. Man, that’s like a horror story on TV.”

Dr. Scott White, Director of the of the South Carolina Seismic Network and a professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment, said that while this activity is unusual, it is not abnormal for South Carolina or the Southeast, and these earthquakes should not be considered precursors to “the big one.”

“There’s nothing about this that suggests that the earthquakes are going to get any larger,” he said.

That is because, according to White, in the geological record there are almost never foreshocks, which are earthquakes that precede larger earthquakes in the same location. They can happen, but they are quite rare, he said.

Some said that this trend concerns them.

“It woke my wife up and she seldom wakes up in the middle of the night,” Steve Jones, longtime Elgin resident, said. “It was just a loud boom, and a lot of times living near Fort Jackson too you hear a lot of noise but experiencing that is totally different.”

Jones said this trend has been “strange,” but added, “We just live with it, it’s in God’s hands so trusting in him for it.”

Elisha Corrigan, who lives in Lugoff, said the earthquake this weekend was the most powerful one she has felt, and that it is “still scary every single time.”

“It’s strange because we’ve gone, you know, my whole life, I’ve lived here my whole life and have never had any experience with earthquakes and then all of a sudden now we’re having them daily, weekly, monthly, she said.

White said that there is no clear reason why all this seismic activity is occurring, this area of ​​Kershaw County is along an ancient fault system called the Eastern Piedmont Fault Zone.

“It’s probably the result of centuries of stress buildup along this Eastern Piedmont Fault system, and we get to live through kind of a special time right now where we’re seeing a lot of little earthquakes occurring along this fault system and hopefully this is the last one that we’ll see,” he said. “But Mother Nature works on her own rhythms and at her own pace and so it will end when it ends, unfortunately.”

Jackson, who has lived in this area for four years, said this earthquake scared her “to death,” and she is hopeful that there will not be any others.

“I know there was an earthquake, but I had never felt nothing like that before in my life,” she said. “It was just so scary because when an earthquake happens, you don’t know when it’s going to happen and it was shaking my bed like a tree, and it shook all the glasses in my cabinet, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t get up.”

White says that while earthquakes are often measured in magnitude, another detail to consider is intensity. This measures the amount of shaking one may feel from an earthquake at any given location.

He said most of the earthquakes in the Elgin area have been about a 4 in terms of intensity. An intensity of 5 is when you could start to see loose objects fall, White said.

Copyright 2022 WIS. All rights reserved.

Notice a spelling or grammar error in this article? Click or tap here to report it. Please include the article’s headline.

[ad_2]