The tremors were so subtle, most people didn't notice, but three earthquakes – the most recent one Sunday night – shook northwest Georgia in the past six days, Channel 2 Action News reports.
“All of a sudden there was an explosion, sort of like a popping,” one resident who did notice, Christopher Smith, told Channel 2. Smith spoke from Dalton, epicenter of two of the quakes.
The first hit at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday, a 2.7 magnitude tremor in the Whitfield County city. The second, a 1.9 temblor, struck 6:50 a.m. Sunday near Trion, about 25 miles to the southwest. The third, measuring 1.8, hit at 10:36 p.m. Sunday in almost exactly the same spot in Dalton as the first one.
Julian Gray, curator and resident geologist at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, suspects the third earthquake was an aftershock of the first.
People shouldn’t be surprised, Gray said in a phone interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Northwest Georgia is in the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone, “probably the second-most seismically active area east of the Mississippi River – the first is the New Madrid area on the Mississippi in southeast Missouri.”
“We have magnitude 1 earthquakes all the time, and they’re detected only by instruments. Something that small, you’d practically have to be lying on the ground in a very quiet area to feel it,” Gray said.
The biggest-ever recorded earthquake in the area was a 4.6 magnitude tremor in Fort Payne, Ala., in 2003, just across the Georgia-Alabama state line from Chattooga County, he said.
And the latest tremors felt here pale in comparison to the Aug. 23, 5.9-magnitude shake centered in north-central Virginia -- something Gray called "a total fluke, because that’s not a seismically active area.”
It is probably a coincidence that Dalton authorities on Monday afternoon reported a structural collapse at the Mohawk carpet plant at 508 Morris St.
A ceiling and retaining wall in a break room collapsed, and the building was evacuated at about 2:50 p.m., according to Bruce Frazier, spokesman for the Dalton Police Department. No one was hurt, and all employees eventually were allowed back into the structure.
Asked if the recent tremors might have had something to with the incident, Frazier said, “We don’t believe so. They haven't given a cause yet, but earthquake is not likely to be a factor.”
Asked if metro Atlanta residents should be concerned about earthquakes, Gray said, “Absolutely not. … The mountains in this area haven’t been active in a major way in 300 million years.”
The latest tremors “are all perfectly normal,” he said. “We’re not in an area where there are continents colliding and causing earthquakes, as in Turkey or California.”
But though Georgians live in a geologically calm area, the earth below is still moving.
“North America is moving to the west about an inch a year, and when you’re moving something the size of a continent, it’s not going to go quietly,” Gray said. “It’s like the creaks and pops you hear in the attic with a house settling.”
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