Earthquake early Friday in southern Illinois felt in Ontario-WEST SALEM, Ill — An early morning earthquake with a magnitude of 5.2 shook Illinois and other nearby states today and was reportedly felt as far away as southern Ontario.
Officials say the 5:36 a.m. EDT quake rattled skyscrapers in Chicago's Loop and homes in Cincinnati, but appears to have caused no major injuries or damage.
Margaret Hay lives in a seventh floor of an apartment in Kitchener, Ont., and believes she felt some rumbling from the tremor.
Hay told radio station CKGL she was reading the newspaper at about 5:35 a.m. when she felt her couch shaking.
The quake was centred in southern Illinois some 10 kilometres from West Salem, Ill., and about 100 kilometres from Evansville, Ind.
The quake is believed to have involved the Wabash fault, a northern extension of the New Madrid fault about 10 kilometres north of Mt. Carmel, Ill., said geophysicist Randy Baldwin of the U.S. Geological Survey .
The last earthquake in the region to approach the severity of Friday's tremor was a 5.0 magnitude quake that shook a nearby area in 2002, Baldwin said.
"This is a fairly large quake for this region," he said. "They might occur every few years."
Baldwin said the USGS revised the quake's magnitude from 5.4 to 5.2.
Earthquake early Friday in southern Illinois felt in Ontario
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