Oak Park Newspaper

It was a mild earthquake, as earthquakes go, but still quite unusual for the region. It happened at 3:59:34 a.m. for those who felt it some thought it was a snow plow, something had hit their apartment building, or just a loud noise. Some residents reported hearing their glasses chime and one of our readers from Schaumburg said their dog got up and barked and growled prior to the earth tremor.

Initial reports were not as accurate as the one following the event. It had been reported that the event had a magnitude of 4.3 on the Richter scale (a logarithmic scale), but was only later measured at 3.8 on the Richter scale (when compared
to the devasting earthquake in Haiti it is less than 1/500th as severe).

The epicenter was also moved from the Sycamore region of the State to Gilberts, Illinois, close to Carpentersville and Dundee. The tremor was felt as far away as Tennessee, due largely to the kind of earth beneath us--a lot of hard rock.

Little is known about our area in terms of seismic history, there is a lack of science to our region if it is not associated with the known seismic zones like the New Madrid and Wabash Valley regions.

I recall an earthquake in Oak Park that was associated with the New Madrid fault line in 1968. It was a Saturday morning and was laying on the wooden floor watching television, on a second floor building and felt the room sway and this was a brick building. Few of my neighbors felt it and there was little or no reported damage to the area. There was also a 5.2 magnitude quake near West Salem, Illinois in 2008. I missed this one too, as did my dogs and bird, and wife.