Small earthquake in Lockport alarms some residents
Bissonette An earthquake in South Lockport on Saturday had some residents worried about what may have been happening nearby, but those fears were mostly due to the noise and not the earth shaking.
According to David Bissonette, natural disaster services coordinator for the Town of Clarence, no damages were reported as a result of the 1.5 magnitude quake, but a loud “boom” sound did raise some hairs.
“No damages, but we did have a number of ‘worried well’ callers who knew that something wasn’t right but just couldn’t identify what,” Bissonette said. “Most calls reported a combination of a loud boom similar to an explosion and some minor shaking.”
The quake registered at 1.5 on the Richter Scale and occurred 6 kilometers west of South Lockport, according to the U.S. Geological Survey website. Bissonette said Clarence Emergency Services was kept abreast of what was happening through a combination of updates from the county emergency management notification system and monitoring other news reports.
Bissonette added that about six calls were taken from all across Clarence, not from any particularly concentrated area.
“It was a little bit of everywhere,” he said. “There weren’t that many calls, just a couple of inquiries. I think a lot of our residents are still a little ‘gun-shy’ when they hear loud noises as a result of the [Flight] 3407 event.”
Bissonette said that he did not receive any reports of aftershocks or any other loud noises after the initial quake occurred at about 6:30 p.m. Saturday. He said he remembered a quake that occurred in Watertown a couple of years ago that was felt all the way in Clarence.
“We all recognize that we live on a fault line,” he said.
According to the USGS website, southwestern Ontario and Western New York have had “moderately frequent” earthquakes since the first was reported in 1840. It added that they occur three to four times every decade.
The largest earthquake recorded nearby was a 4.9 magnitude event that happened near Attica, New York, in 1929.
email: sjagord@beenews.com
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