That Wasn’t An Explosion in Western Maine Thursday Night – It Was an Earthquake

Residents of the little town of Greenwood in Western Maine with a population of 830 were startled around 10:30 on September 15 by what many thought was an explosion as they felt a slight shaking sensation. Come to find out, it wasn't anything quite that dangerous.

In case you aren't familiar with Greenwood, it's located east of West Paris and southeast of Bethel in the western mountains of Maine and is the home of Mt. Abram Ski Resort.

According to WMTW 8, the United States Geological Survey confined that Greenwood was the center of a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. That's very small on the Richter scale, but just enough to slightly feel the effects of it without the quake causing any damage.

To put that in comparison, the Northridge, California earthquake in 1994 was 6.7 on the Richer scale and caused significant damage, killing 57 people and injuring more than 9000. The damage was estimated at the time to be between $13 and $50 billion and was one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.

Maine does get a handful of earthquakes each year, but most of them are so small that they go unnoticed.

I remember feeling an earthquake when I was a kid in the early 80s. We were visiting some family friends in Fryeburg, which is also in Maine's western mountains. It was just a gentle rumbling of the ground and the rattling of a few glasses in a nearby cupboard, but it's still an experience that I haven't forgotten to this day.