BY The Cincinnati Enquirer and Associated Press
SHARON, Pa. -- An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 5.2 shook buildings in at least four states Friday, but caused little or no damage.
The quake was felt in Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit and the Buffalo, N.Y., area but was still relatively minor, said John Minsch, geophysicist for the Geological Survey.
The afternoon quake was centered in northwest Pennsylvania, about 15 miles northeast of Sharon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.
Magnitude 5 can produce moderate damage.
"It was like riding on a bumpy road," said Steve Fought, a campaign spokesman for U.S. Senate candidate Mary Boyle. He felt the tremor at his Cleveland office.
While high-rise office workers felt the quake, several people on the street said they didn't notice anything unusual.
FirstEnergy Corp., which operates two nuclear power plants along Lake Erie, said the quake wasn't strong enough to set off alarms at the plants.
In Detroit, Kathleen McNeill was watching television when the tremor hit. "I was sitting in my chair and it was reclined a little bit, and it was shaking back and forth," she said.
Professor Attila Kilinc, head of the geology department at the University of Cincinnati, said Friday's quake was similar to others that have hit the region -- moderate to mild.
Though there are no major faults in the area, he said, many small faults lie beneath Ohio and Kentucky. Earthquakes along those faults tend to register 5.0 or less in magnitude.
The fault line where the quake hit is a meeting point of 300-million-year-old plates of rock that generally don't move much when they shift, said Mark Wilson, a professor of geology at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio.
Ohio officials plan to set up an earthquake monitoring network in November that will include at least six stations around the state, said Tom Bert, a geologist of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Geological Survey.
Wooster's seismograph registered Friday's quake, Mr. Wilson said. In about two months, UC, too, will have a seismograph, Mr. Kilinc said.
Geologists estimate that in the past 200 years there have been 130 Ohio earthquakes strong enough to be felt at the surface. The largest Ohio quake on record happened near Anna, about 70 miles northwest of Columbus, on March 9, 1937, and destroyed a school. It was rated at 5.5, an estimate based on a seismographic reading in St. Louis.
Nobody in recorded history has died in an Ohio quake.
Although earthquakes have caused little damage in Ohio, many Tristate residents have it added to their insurance coverage.
"Actually, we probably put it on about half of the homeowner policies we write right now," said Dale Schubeler, owner of Centennial Insurance Agency Inc. of Silverton.
Earthquake insurance is relatively inexpensive in the Midwest. It is less expensive for a frame home than a brick structure, Mr. Schubeler said. And homeowners are not the only people who may need it. Renters can suffer losses, too, when an earthquake hits.
"It's not the building owner's responsibility at that point," he said.
