(KCPW News) For those of you living in or around Bountiful, you may have noticed the dinner plates rattling in your cupboard for a few seconds late Wednesday—say, around 10:34 p.m. local time. Well, if you thought it might have been an earthquake, you were right. The 3.3-magnitude tremor occurred just 10 miles east of Bountiful.
Katherine Whidden, a research seismologist at the University of Utah seismograph station, says the quake was felt in areas as far away as Tooele, North Ogden, Park City, and Draper. But since it was a relatively weak earthquake, a lot of people, like herself, didn’t feel anything.
“Unless they were really close to the epicenter, most people felt just like a jolt or two,” she says. “There’s disturbances in our everyday lives, like trucks driving by or outside noise, so we might not notice these things.”
While a 3.3 on the Richter scale might be miniscule, Whidden says it’s a good reminder of the damage a bigger earthquake in Utah could do. “These small earthquakes are a good reminder that we live in earthquake country and could have a large, damaging earthquake at any time.”
Whidden says that Utahns can report the next seismic event—large or small—on the seismograph station’s website: quake.utah.edu.
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