Earthquake: 5.2 Quake Felt In Toronto, Began In Ottawa Valley; More Tremors Expected

Toronto has been shaken many times this week.An Icarus-like brush with the Stanley Cup for the Maple Leafs, a tragic murder with no discernable motive in the Tim Bosma case, a narrowly avoided LCBO strike, our mayor making international headlines ... It made Friday’s actual earthquake seem too much to be true.

But it is, confirms Earthquakes Canada which found that at 9:43 a.m., a minor quake — 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale — rippled out from the Quebec side of the Ottawa Valley.Computer monitors, coffee cups and chandeliers in Toronto, Waterloo, Sudbury, New York, and parts of Michigan and Ohio quivered.

Ten minutes later came a 4.1-magnitude aftershock.

No injuries or damage — apart from a few broken picture frames and the like — have been reported.

“We don’t expect to see major damage from an earthquake until it gets to around a 5.5,” says Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Still, Mayor Albert Armstrong of Shawville, Que., a town 18 kilometres southwest of the epicentre, says he has never felt anything like it in his whole life.

“I thought a large truck had crashed into the side of the building,” he said. The three-storey-high brick walls of City Hall were trembling and the window panes rattling.

The rumbling sounded “like something breaking the sound barrier,” he said.

Earthquake Canada seismologist John Adams expects tens to hundreds of smaller tremors to follow the earthquake, mostly close to the epicentre.

It’s not unusual for an earthquake to be felt this widely in Eastern North America, says Paul Caruso. “It’s because the rocks underground are very hard and continuous, they transmit the energy very well.”

In Toronto, the tremors were missed by many — like Alycia Suriyakumar who took the decorative masks dancing on her bedroom wall to be a vivid nightmare.

But Risë Lawrence, an office administrator at Hillcrest Christian School certainly noticed.