Missouri 4.0 Earthquake Felt in 9 States
A small 4.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Missouri and several other Midwestern states Tuesday morning.
The earthquake struck the New Madrid zone, which is a 150-mile stretch of land between Tennessee and Missouri that crosses through six other states.
The quake only caused minor damage and but managed to wake people up in Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee as it struck at 3:58 a.m. Tuesday. People living in Indiana, North Carolina, and Georgia also reported feeling the quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
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Although no damages were reported from the quake, residents living near the earthquake's epicenter in East Prairie, Mo., were left in shock, despite the common occurrence of small-scale earthquakes in the region.
"I live on a main highway and five miles from the reported epicenter. It sounded like a semi-truck and it rattle my windows and it rattled my house," Rhonda Brack a restaurant manager in East Prairie told MSNBC.
"We're no strangers to quakes, but this one was different. We had one four years ago and that one rolled. This one was straight underneath us and lasted for 30 seconds or so," she added, telling the news agency that the impact reminded her of lightning.
The small quake came just days after Missouri residents commemorated the 200th anniversary of a series of several massive earthquakes that shook the state and caused the Mississippi River to reverse its flow for a period.
The three earthquakes occurred between 1811 and 1812 and were some of the strongest earthquakes in the history of the United States. As a result of the massive quakes, the town of New Madrid on the Mississippi River was entirely destroyed during the disaster. The earthquake's magnitudes are estimated to have been anywhere from 7.1 to 8.21 on The Richter Scale.
Since 1812 the largest earthquake in the region occurred in 1895 with a 6.6-magnitude quake that caused massive damage to St. Louis, Memphis, and Charleston.
