Did you feel it?
It wasn’t a bird, a plane or a crash. It was an earthquake.
That’s right, a confirmed earthquake with a magnitude of 3.8 struck the coast of York Harbor right before 10:30 a.m. We didn’t feel it at the Daily Item office, but according to Facebook, everyone else did. The second we opened our newsfeeds, we were swarmed with posts of New Englanders asking their neighbors if they had felt it, too.
From the depths of Maine all the way to the Cape and Islands, that uneasy jolt of turbulence came out of nowhere and left just as quickly as it arrived. A former Lynn native, who now resides in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, commented that “he thought someone hit his house with a car” at first.
“What happened here? The house shook?” Another Facebook user posted in a Swampscott community group.
“Same here in Peabody,” another user responded.
“I felt it too,” another posted. “It felt like my bed was vibrating and I heard a buzzing sound.”
Bill and Heather Hilty exclaimed in a family group text that their Peabody home “shook for five whole seconds.” Pamela Young, who lives in the highlands of Lynn, said over the phone that she couldn’t believe it was an earthquake.
“It was so loud, I truly thought it was one of those large jets flying directly over my house,” she added. “We even lost power for a few minutes!”
Spenser Hasak, the Item’s Creative Director and Lead Staff Photographer, could feel the earthquake in Salem. He said his whole apartment shook, all the windows rattled and his “plants were dancing around like they were in a nightclub.”
This earthquake is one of the most powerful quakes to hit the area in the past 30 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was first reported as a 4.1 magnitude but as the true Richter scale measurements came in, it was lowered to 3.8. Thankfully, there have been no reports of serious damages, injuries or fatalities.
