Town chuckles over quake

AUBURN, Neb. -- Auburn residents are taking Wednesday night's minor earthquake with a dose of humor.

By Thursday morning Philly Grill owners Rich and Debbie Cox were already advertising an "earthquake burger special" — a regular hamburger with hashbrowns and salad for $6.99.

Regulars at the grill described the earthquake as not much more than a minor scare.

Tom Smiley, an American Family Insurance agent, said he had been getting e-mails and calls from co-workers in Omaha asking if he was selling earthquake insurance.

"Everybody is pretty much laughing it off," Smiley said.

Smiley said that, at first, he thought the City of Auburn might be dumping large amounts of snow outside his house, and the tractor's bucket fell to the ground too quickly.

At the Cox home, Debbie said that she heard what sounded like a large explosion, but there wasn't enough trembling to shake the snow off the roof. "My daughter came flying out of her bedroom and said, "Mom, what was that?"

Her daughter's boyfriend, who lives in Tecumseh, knew immediately what it was. "He said, 'It's probably just an earthquake. We live on the Humboldt fault line.'"

Some people in town were thinking meth lab explosion.

Glenda Burow, a waitress at the Family Connection Cafe, had gone to bed at 8:30 p.m. and slept right through the quake. She had gotten up at 3:30 a.m. the day earlier to open the cafe.

She's catching up with it now. "It certainly is the talk of the town," Burow said.

Most residents said the earthquake of 2004 left a bigger impression.

Sally Dea's son Jake was home from Northwest Missouri State on break. The family has been having trouble with their furnace.

"Jake thought the furnace must have blown up," Sally Dea said. "He was afraid to open the basement door, because he thought black smoke would come rolling out.

The earthquake appears to have caused little damage, officials said.

The epicenter of the magnitude 3.5 quake was about two miles northwest of Auburn and about 51 miles southeast of Lincoln, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It occurred at about 8:53 p.m.

Cell phone service to the area was interrupted, either by the quake or the increased number of calls that followed it, one witness told The World-Herald, and the walls of some homes and businesses showed small cracks.

Marcia Goering, 63, lives with her husband on an acreage north of town.

“I was sitting in one room watching TV, and my husband was in another room,” she said. “All of a sudden, there was this really big noise and this jolt that just shook you back and forth really quick. It almost sounded like ... an explosion. That's what it felt like.”

The couple found no visible damage to their house, only to a small rocking horse figurine that fell from a shelf.

Most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains experiences infrequent earthquakes, according to the USGS. Earthquakes occur on faults within bedrock, usually miles deep. This one began about 3.1 miles below the surface.

Quakes east of the Rockies are typically felt over much broader regions than similar quakes on the West Coast, according to the USGS.

The largest recorded earthquake in the state's history occurred March 28, 1964, when a magnitude 5.1 quake struck near Merriman, in Cherry County.

A lesser quake, one of similar magnitude to Wednesday's, took place about 20 miles northeast of Auburn, in Fremont County, Iowa, in July 2004.

Wednesday's quake could be felt as far away as northwest Missouri and southwest Iowa and throughout much of southeast Nebraska.

According to the USGS, the first significant earthquake recorded in Nebraska was on April 24, 1867. Since then, at least seven earthquakes have originated in the state and several quakes in neighboring states have been felt in Nebraska.

World-Herald staff writers Andrew J. Nelson and Juan Perez Jr. contributed to this report.

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