One of Oklahoma’s largest earthquakes on record rattled other parts of the Midwest on Saturday from Nebraska to North Texas, and likely will turn new attention to the practice of disposing oil and gas field wastewater deep underground.
Advertisement
Other cities that felt the quake include Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Dallas. Many on social media reported being awakened by the quake, which struck at about 7:02 EDT.
Many people in the Dallas area felt a 5.6-magnitude quake just after 7 a.m. Saturday.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, a regulatory agency that examines the state’s fuel, oil, gas, public utilities and transportation industries, is “reviewing disposal wells in the vicinity of the quake near Pawnee”, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said via Twitter.
The epicenter was around 8 miles northwest of Pawnee, a town of less than 3,000 people.
“Police in Pawnee report some windows were broken and homes sustained damage to the the outside facade”. The U.S. Geological Survey rated it at 5.6, and the federal agency says aftershocks may occur. The state is recording an average of two and a half earthquakes daily of a magnitude 3 or higher, a seismicity rate 600 times greater than before 2008. Saturday’s quake is just the fourth of 5.0 magnitude or greater in Oklahoma’s history, according to a Tulsa World report. State regulators have asked producers to reduce wastewater disposal volumes in earthquake-prone regions of the state.
No injuries have been reported.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin says that crews are checking bridges and structures for damage.
The station says the Oklahoma Geological Survey is now working on a six-month study of injection wells to get a grip on how to cut the chances that operations “inadvertently induce a seismic event”, as an oil industry representative said last month.
Sean Weide in Omaha, Nebraska, told the AP that he’d never been in an natural disaster before and thought he was getting dizzy.
Wills said buildings in the downtown area are cracked and sandstone facing on some buildings fell and described the scene as “a mess”.
Advertisement
The Oklahoma Department of Transportation is checking bridges for damage and structural engineers are assessing building safety according to Fallin.
