This morning we had an earthquake in the Seattle region. I had just finished breakfast at the table when I heard a loud noise upstairs and I turned my head to hear better. Then I felt my chair being pushed underneath from the left, then slightly to the right. It felt like the earth moved from west to east in a wave. People on the local tv news channel didn’t say anything. Nothing fell off shelves or anything. When I got to work I checked it out online. It was a magnitude 4.5 quake near Kingston, about 50 miles southwest of me. Several people at work were woken up by it, and they live a little closer to the epicentre. My wife and kids slept through it. All over the news now apparently. Better to have lots of smallish ones like that than the Big One. I’m going to check for damage when I get home tonight, see if “the crack” has changed (there is a crack in the wall and ceiling from general house settling. To be expected on clay, apparently. Better to be on clay than sand in an earthquake zone, I would have thought).
Not as common as California, but this is the Pacific rim so they are expected every few years. Still waiting on the Big One that will wreak everything.
Southern Wisconsin, Southern Iowa and most of Illinois are actually occasionaly known to have Earthquakes, they had a bad one 160 years ago. There was a minor one in the 70’s that my parents could feel.