I just read that there was a 4.5 earthquake in, of all places, northern Illinois (near Ottawa, IL) this morning around 0100 local time.
Carol, anyone else in that area . . . did you feel it?
I suppose southern Illinois is used to feeling the occasional shake from New Madrid, but northern Illinois? Wacky!
It was just a 4.5, but I hope there was neither damage nor injury.
Stuart
Wow!
Reckon Illinois will fall into the ocean when California doe…err… river?? Hey! the Illinois River runs dow through this country too!
We had a pretty good shake when I was a teenager, living in Mindanao, one night (7.5 at the epicenter I think was reported). It was like being in a boat on the sea. Scary stuff. I stayed up till daylight, and ran outside at the slightest tremor.
A 4.5 is just a good massage for the feet, take it from a guy who lives in the bay area. 
No worries!
Out there, yeah. Here, we get a 3.5 shudder and its a seven-day wonder. I understand the quake was felt here, but I slept through it.
Illinois does run really near the New Madrid fault in Missouri. That one hasn’t really popped since 1811, but if it ever does the disaster scenarios are as scary as anything in California.
There was a weak quake about that size in the south here a while ago. I didn’t think much of it, barely woke me up, and I thought I had dreamed it until someone else mentioned it later.
My mother was ticked off at the crack that showed up on the side of our brick house, but nothing fell over.
Good point. I read somewhere that in 1811 that quake made the Mississippi River run backwards.
Yes! I felt and saw it: I was upstairs at my desk in my room, which is a converted attic, and I could see the sloped ceiling/wall move and feel the whole one-and-a-half story brick house shudder. Right away I looked online to see if there’d been an earthquake here and I didn’t find anything, so I thought maybe it was…what? Couldn’t come up with an answer. It was mild, yet definitely enough to make me imagine, in my usual calm and rational way, how the WHOLE HOUSE COULD COME TUMBLING DOWN.
Who else around here felt it?
Carol
I slept through it. By the time it got to the Chicago area there was probably not much shake left in it anyway. But our morning news here have reported it very sedately, so i guess/hope the damage was small.
From the article that avanutria posted the link to:
\
Gary Spaulding of Marseilles, Ill., said he was relaxing in his mobile home when the quake struck.
“It was like somebody shot off dynamite,” said Spaulding, who added that his cat leaped out of his lap and would still not come near him two hours later. “I thought maybe a tree hit my trailer.”<<
Evidently Mr. Spaulding’s cat has blamed him for other things in the past. Dynamite comes to mind.
Glad you’re okay, Carol, Glauber, Chuck, and all.
The 1811 New Madrid quake temporarily reversed the flow of the (then much smaller) Mississippi and permanently rerouted the river, one result being Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. It also caused church bells to ring in New York and Boston. Fortunately the area was sparsely populated with mostly very primitive structures.
A few years back I participated in the disaster planning when that whacko “scientist” was predicting that the NM was about to blow. Among other predictions: loss of all Mississippi bridges between Burlington, Iowa and Baton Rouge, LA; catastrophic damage to Memphis; massive damage to Little Rock, St. Louis, Columbia, Mo; heavy damage to Nashville; some damage as far off as Chicago, New Orleans and Kansas City; millions of casualties and a complete collapse of medical and food distribution systems nationwide (try and imagine how much shipping crosses the Mississippi on rail and road bridges and moves along it on barges everyday).
I live in Iowa City, IA and we felt it too. I was just getting to bed when my bedroom started to shake like there was a train going by, excpet there was no whistle or chugging to be heard. It was odd, but I didn’t bother me until I heard what had happened on NPR the next morning.
My cat slept through it all, which was not my first clue that I have a defective cat. Magnetic-field ESP abilities my ass. - Jo
New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 had the Mississippi River running backwards for three days, after shocks continued to knock chimineys down for three years thereafter. They say the tree would rotate 90 Deg. and slap the ground and then come back up.
We had a joke back in Illinois about how this guy came up with his prediction. He said it would happen on Dec 3, 12/3, after one of the famous quakes that happened on Jan 23 1812, that is, 1/23.
ONE TWO THREE! It all makes sense!
Caj
You should oughta return it and get your money back–just like you would with an expensive whistle that turned out not to work right.
My Goodness Gracious!!! 
We had an earthquake last night in Lake Erie, offshore from Cleveland. It rated a whopping 3.5 on the Richter scale. The earth really did move!
Mike
I remember that stuff about New Madrid in the late 90s myself. I also remember reading up on the fault itself, and that nobody really understands the dynamics of that kind of fault (one in the middle of a big plate, like a pop-off valve).
And heck, we can’t predict the quakes on the big subduction faults (cf San Andreas), so why could we on New Madrid?
And how do you pronounce the name of the fault in Illinois? We (Arkansas) call it “New MADD-rid.”
Stuart
My brother living on the Canadian side of Lake Erie in Leamington, felt the same earthquake. There is a major fault very deep under Lake Erie and over the last thirty years or so at my parents place experienced earthquakes with some of them strong enough to rattle objects off shelves.
In 1999, when I was married, my wife returning from Detroit via the tunnel to Windsor Ontario, experienced her greatest fear, and that was being in the tunnel during an earthquake. Traffic was heavy and custom agents were slow, so she sitting in traffic right in the middle of the tunnel under the Detroit river when all the cars rocked enough to be noticed.
I never saw a person down a pint of Guinness so fast in all my life. It was really unnerving next day trying to get her to go to work using the bridge rather than the tunnel.
MarkB
I felt that quake the other night at about 1:30am here in Milwaukee. Here I am, sitting at my computer, when I felt some movement like when you are in an elevator that has a shudder or something. I heard some stuff rattle in the house, but thats about it. Other than the minor displacement, I wasnt even sure what happened. I thought either a gust of wind or a large object had struck the house. I looked outside, saw no trace of wind or objects and forgot about it until the next day when I heard a tidbit on the radio about it.