"We've had hundreds of calls of people saying the tremors knocked pictures off walls, and a couple said their windows were cracked," said Herbert Dodd, head of emergency services in Chattooga County, Georgia, not far from the epicenter on the Georgia-Alabama border.
The snow and ice dumped by an unusually severe winter storm were melting, once-frigid temperatures were rising and residents of South Carolina and Georgia finally had begun to relax.A small earthquake shook both states late Friday, shaking homes and rattling residents hundreds of miles away.The quake happened at 10:23 p.m. and had a preliminary magnitude of 4.1, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's website. Three others of similar magnitude have been felt in South Carolina in the past 40 years, according to the USGS.The largest earthquake ever recorded on the East Coast was a 7.3-magnitude quake near Charleston in August 1886 that killed at least 60 people.Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inboxThis material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. I was quick to get up and see if it was a tornado. So they're felt over a wide area but not as strongly as some other types of earthquakes." So far they have not been serious. Tomorrow morning, I go out to get my paper and I see the bricks in my house are cracked," Casey said.Authorities across South Carolina said their 911 centers were inundated with calls of people reporting what they thought were explosions or plane crashes as the quake's low rumble spread across the state.Reports surfaced on Twitter of a leaking water tower in Augusta, Ga., following the quake, but the tower was damaged by ice from a winter storm earlier this week and not the quake, said Richmond County Sheriff's Lt. Tangela McCorkle.No damages or injuries from the quake itself had been reported, said South Carolina Emergency Management Division spokesman Derrec Becker. I could be looking at damage in the dark and not know it. All market data delayed 20 minutes. Screen shot: USGS 1,104 major (6.0+) to super (8.0+) earthquakes hit various places worldwide over the last 2,237 days. "The shaking of my bed and the shaking of my house woke me out of a dead sleep." "First I thought it was thunder. There's potential for a larger event," Long said. The best independent earthquake reporting website in the world . "It felt like an explosion. Below is an interactive guide to earthquake magnitude and severity: