Maryland Earthquake

Not much later than 5 a.m., Gaithersburg got hit by Maryland – A 3.6 magnitude earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological survey. The area where Maryland earthquake struck the hardest is around 20 miles northwest of Washington.

Steve Dolce, a CNN technical manager, said his house in Germantown, Maryland, “vibrated slightly” for about 10 seconds. The Maryland earthquake has set the records high for the area being the strongest one since 1971. The Maryland earthquake is the first one to exceed 3.0 on the Richter Scale”, according to Amy Vaughan, “geophysicist at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center”.

This one came as an important one for D.C. “It was really loud, like a plane flying really low. I had never felt anything like it,” said Anne Ngunjiri, 30, of Gaithersburg, Maryland. “I was jolted out of bed. All my neighbors woke up. After it passed, I thought it could be an earthquake, and lay in bed hoping there were no aftershocks.”

While writing e-mails in bed in Rockville, Maryland, my house started shaking all of a sudden, said Judy Rudolph, 64. “My first reaction was the noise … I thought it was an explosion,” she said

Vaughan said that the Maryland earthquake was actually expectable. The last largest earthquake since 1974 was in 1993 and was a 2.7 magnitude.

“Occasionally these things do happen even east of the Rockies, even though it’s not really on a plate boundary where we expect earthquakes. … Faults do exist from when the continent was forming. There are small faults that do exist within this area,” she said.

No injuries and property damages had been reported, as told by Washington’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.

Maryland had suffered its last earthquake about 5 miles from Baltimore, which was measured as 1.7 magnitude, on October 8, 2007.