No reports of damage as 4.6 quake rattles Seattle

The cracking of the Juan de Fuca plate, deep beneath the Olympic Peninsula, rattled the Seattle and Puget Sound area at 5:25 a.m. today but there were no immediate reports of damage from the 4.6 magnitude earthquake.

"It was significant but not huge," said Bill Steele, coordinator of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network's Seismology Lab, located at the University of Washington. "We've had no reports of damage and we don't expect any."

By 7 a.m., seismologists had received 900 reports from people who felt the quake, from the Olympic Peninsula to the Greater Seattle-Everett area, Steele said. The quake occurred 58 kilometers below the surface — and far below the earth's crust, which means there's little chance that anyone will feel tiny aftershocks, he said.

"It was probably the cracking of the Juan de Fuca plate deep beneath us. The slab is under stress and is being pulled by gravity," Steele said.

The earthquake was centered east of Kingston.

Steele said it occurred just north of the center of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake that registered a magnitude 6.8 and caused damage throughout the region.

Though the actual cracking of the Juan de Fuca plate lasted maybe a second this morning, followed by 10 to 20 seconds of reverberations, the quake still woke plenty of people up.

"It shook the house like something had hit the roof," said Robert Lynden, who lives on Anderson Island in Puget Sound. "It just woke us up." Other than knocking a water fountain off his deck there was no damage.

Lacey Menne says it shook her home as she was preparing to go to work at the Coastal Cafe in Kingston.

"It wasn't strong enough to make anything fall," she said. "It was like, what is that? I think it might be an earthquake. It's totally an earthquake!"

James Baird, who lives in Jefferson County near the border with Kitsap County, said he was drying clothes when he felt movement and said "Hey, this doesn't feel like my dryer shaking ... It was definitely an earthquake."

The quake caused Tye Thompson, who lives on Dexter Avenue in Seattle, to jump out of bed and lock the sliding-glass door to the balcony off his second-floor apartment.

"It was so quick — like boom-boom-boom — and I thought it was either somebody trying to move furniture or somebody trying to scale the side of my deck," said Thompson. "That was my half-awake logic."

Then he switched on the TV news: "I was like, that explains everything. I don't need to be paranoid," Thompson said with a laugh.

Friday's quake was "our biggest event" in more than a year, said John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which monitors seismic activity in Washington and Oregon.

"Essentially, there's an ongoing series of earthquakes at that location," Vidale said of the Juan de Fuca plate, but most of them are too small to be felt.

In downtown Seattle, people would've felt 1/1000th of a G, which is the measurement of the force of gravity, while closer to the epicenter, it would have registered about 1/400th of a G, Vidale said. A serious earthquake would be between 1/3 and ½ of a G.

The state Department of Transportation didn't find any problems in the structures they looked at this morning. The agency inspected the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the I-90 and SR 520 bridges and the approaches to those bridges. Crews also will check on structures closer to the quakes's center and throughout Kitsap, Snohomish, King and Clallam counties.

Portions of this report came from The Associated Press