Haines residents felt the earth rumble Saturday evening after a small, but close earthquake 10 miles south of Haines rattled the area.
“I was sitting on my couch working on some work on the laptop. It sounded like a giant crash had just happened, like some huge thing had just fallen,” said Dana Perreard who lives in town. “The windows rattled. That was all I really heard or felt. I didn’t think it was an earthquake”
The 2.5 magnitude quake occurred at a depth of 4.5 miles between Glacier Point and the Chilkat Peninsula. Quakes this size occur frequently, but often not around people, said Alaska Earthquake Center director Michael West.
“Similar earthquakes like that happen in Southeast most days of the week. There’s just nobody there to feel them,” West said.
Other residents reported hearing sounds like a gunshot or cannon. West said that sound likely wasn’t the sound of the earthquake itself, but the environment responding to the soundwaves caused by the earth’s jolt.
West said the fault line the quake occurred on, the Denali Fault, isn’t well understood by seismologists. The Denali Fault is at the upper end of the Fairweather Queen Charlotte Fault System.