No damage as earthquake hits Esterhazy area

REGINA Les Salkeld immediately knew an earthquake was happening when he felt the ground rumble underneath him Thursday evening.

“They’re common,” he said. Salkeld was in his trailer home in the village of Gerald, approximately 245 kilometres east of Regina, around 8:30 p.m. Thursday when the earth shook.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the 4.1 magnitude quake was centred about 17 kilometres east of Esterhazy and had a depth of about five kilometres.

Salkeld said the epicentre was right under his house.

“It was a good rumble,” he said. “It was one of the better ones.”

Other than his power being out for a couple of hours, he said his home didn’t suffer any damage.

Salkeld said many people mistake earthquakes in the area for passing trains and don’t often feel them because they’re very small.

The quake was also felt in nearby Esterhazy.

“There were some individuals that said they felt a little bit of a shake,” said Esterhazy Mayor Grant Forster on Friday morning. “But ... we didn’t see anything in terms of damage.”

Forster said Esterhazy doesn’t have a specific contingency plan in the event of a larger seismic event other than its regular emergency management operations plan.

He said the only noticeable thing the earthquake produced in town was the loss of power.

Saskpower spokesman Joel Cherry confirmed that the power was out in the area from shortly after 8:30 p.m. to around 10:35 p.m. Thursday evening.

He said around 8,400 customers were affected.

Cherry said the loss of power originated from a gas relay — a device used to detect gas leaks or pressure changes — at Saskpower’s switching station near Tantallon, about 30 kilometres southeast of Esterhazy.

“When the vibration from the earthquake happened, basically the gas relays tripped off,” said Cherry. “So that turned the power off.”

He said three of the four transformers were tripped as a result.

The quake’s epicentre was very close to Mosaic’s K2 Potash Mine. Mosaic spokesperson Sarah Fedorchuk confirmed the mine suffered a loss of power for a couple of hours, and the approximately 120 employees in the mine at the time were mustered and accounted for.

Fedorchuk said there was no damage from the quake and no major impact to the site’s operations even though work had to be stopped during the outage.

Alison Bird, an earthquake seismologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, said that area of the province sees a few small earthquakes every year.

While Saskatchewan doesn’t fall on any fault lines, Bird said mines in the area are one likely cause for the tremors.

“You’re removing rocks, so sometimes if you remove rock from an area ... it could collapse,” she said. “There have been some collapses occasionally in that area in older parts of the mine.”

Rain can also cause quakes by lubricating fissures in the ground around the mine, said Bird.

But mining isn’t the only cause. Bird said post glacial rebounds (rising of land masses following the removal of ice sheets from thousands of years prior) can cause the earth’s crust to fluctuate, setting off tremors.