Earthquake shakes West Hartford

Magnitude 1.9 tremor causes no reported injuries

Asmall earthquake shook West Hartford early Friday, startling residents and leading to a flurry of activity on social media but no reports of significant damage or injuries.

It struck at 1:14 a.m. The tremor was only 1.9 magnitude, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The earthquake was based three kilometers, or less than two miles, southwest of West Hartford, the U.S.G.S. said. It originated from more than a mile underground.

Although the earthquake had residents surprised, they aren’t as uncommon in Connecticut as people think, Vernon Cormier, a geophysics professor at UConn, said.

“It’s rare but not impossible. There’s typically at least one or several magnitude 3s somewhere in the New England area over the space of a 10-year period,” he said. “Often they’re so small they’re heard more than they’re felt.”

West Hartford police received about 10 calls from residents who heard a bang and felt the tremor, a dispatcher said. Officers were sent out to investigate the noise complaints. Police didn’t know it was an earthquake until they saw it on TV, she said.

Residents also ran to Facebook minutes after the event, asking if anyone knew what was going on. Comments said the noise “sounded like an explosion,” others thought a tree or branch fell and another said she thought her son fell off the bed.

“Several months ago someone totaled two cars in our driveway and it was the same sound. I was like ‘Oh my God! Someone hit the house. Someone hit the cars,’ “Debra Juers Jansing, a West Hartford resident, said. “It was just so loud. I thought maybe a transformer blew nearby. It sounded like thunder on steroids.”

There wasn’t any significant damage or any injuries, West Hartford mayor Shari Cantor said.

“This obviously has been a very interesting year, where you just never know what’s coming at you,” Cantor said. “It’s wonderful to have a community that supports each other. I did get a lot of emails from people outside the community asking if we were OK. Obviously this is something that got a lot of attention because it’s so unusual.”

The earthquake didn’t even register on UConn’s seismograph, a machine used to measure earthquakes.

“I didn’t even see a tiny blip,” Cormier said.

In July 2019, an earthquake of the same magnitude shook the Middletown area, and in 2015, about dozen rocked the northeastern towns of Plainfield and Killingly. There were no injuries. In the 1980s, a series of earthquakes rattled the Moodus section of East Haddam — where rumblings go back hundreds of years.

Generally speaking, there isn’t much to worry about, Cormier said.

“Over the space of over a hundred years, it’s possible to have an event as large as a 5 or 6 that could create more measurable or observable damage and danger. But, those events in our area tend to occur on intervals with the probability being one happening every 300 or 400 years,” Cormier said. “I wouldn’t alarm anyone in Connecticut or New England because the occurrences aren’t anything large enough.”