By Ashley Wiebe

Hatters feel Montana earthquake, aftershocks

Jul 6, 2017 | 4:45 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — An earthquake south of the border early Thursday morning was enough to make some people in Medicine Hat jump out of bed.

The 5.8 magnitude quake hit near Lincoln, Montana around 12:30 a.m. and was followed by nine aftershocks.

“My 15-year-old daughter came rushing into the room, terrified, thinking that someone was on our upper balcony, trying to actually break into the house,” said Madeline Buchholz, who was already wide awake.

Buchholz calls herself a light sleeper and said she’d felt her bed shaking.

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“It was a side to side motion that I was feeling, and initially I just assumed it was Suffield,” she said.

But the shaking felt throughout parts of the city wasn’t an army drill.

The quake hit roughly 500 kilometres southwest of Medicine Hat.

“My husband slept through the whole thing,” Buchholz said. “He didn’t have a clue. And several of my friends slept through it, others didn’t.”

“Quakes this size will be felt very far away and that’s what you’re experiencing,” said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey, over the phone from Golden, Colorado. “I’m not at all surprised that there are a lot of people that maybe have never felt an earthquake, ‘cause this doesn’t happen real often.”

Records show the last time the city felt shocks from an earthquake was back in 1909.

“Every once in a while we’ll get a good jolt at our house,” said Buchholz, referring to the activity at CFB Suffield. “Usually it’s only a short jolt, so I was quite surprised that it was such a large amount of shaking, but I couldn’t think of any other explanation because obviously earthquakes aren’t heard of around here.”

Blakeman said earthquakes are common in Montana, but not ones of this magnitude.

The quake did cause food to fly off the shelves at one Lincoln area grocery store.

Blakeman said because of the size of the quake, he’s not surprised Canadians felt it too.

“The larger the quake, the further it’ll be felt and that makes good sense,” he said. “It’s like throwing a big rock out in the middle of a pond. The bigger the rock is, the further the ripples travel.”

For more information about the earthquake, click here.