A late-night earthquake shook homes throughout the Sunshine Coast on Tuesday, Dec. 29, waking some from slumber and sending hundreds to social media to share their experiences within minutes of the 11:39 p.m. quake.
“It was like a laundry machine going out of control and then exploding next door, that's what it felt like ... Like started out kinda lightly and then got rather intense,” Cassandra Amarbir Kaur posted on the Sunshine Coast Community Concerns & FYI Posts Facebook page.
Gordon Schaller said his “bed shook like jelly, for eight seconds!”
Still others said via social media they’d felt nothing.
“Slept right through it, so did all of my pets ... some guard dogs,” Kelli Dilday posted.
There were no reports of damage on the Sunshine Coast.
The earthquake measured 4.3 in magnitude, according to Earthquakes Canada (4.8 according to the U.S. Geological Survey) and it originated about 17 km northeast of Victoria at a depth of about 52 kilometres.
It was the fourth earthquake to make Coast Reporter headlines since 2011 when a 6.7 magnitude quake west of Vancouver Island rattled Coasters on Sept. 9 at 12:41 p.m.
Although the 2011 quake was much larger than the recent one, residents felt varying degrees of shaking and no damage was reported, just moving light fixtures, rolling aquarium water and shifting pictures on walls.
On Dec. 11, 2014 at 7 a.m., a 3.2 magnitude earthquake originated in Georgia Strait and a 3.5 magnitude quake hit Feb. 14, 2015 about 12 km west of Vancouver at around 8 p.m.
None of these earthquakes resulted in any damage on the Sunshine Coast but each served as a wakeup call to Coast residents to get prepared for a larger seismic event in the future.
Learn how to prepare for an earthquake or other natural disaster at www.getprepared.gc.ca
