A rare magnitude 5.0 earthquake rattled parts of the Texas Panhandle early Thursday morning. It's the strongest quake to hit that region in at least 100 years, according to online data compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
The epicenter was located about 24 miles southeast of Spearman, a town northeast of Amarillo, USGS reported.
"My cat woke me up. He kind of freaked out about it a little bit and that woke me up," said Robertson County Judge Mitchell Locke, who serves as emergency management coordinator. "But I did feel it. There was some shaking. Nothing too extreme, though."
Robertson County is a rural community with a population of about 900 people. As of Thursday morning, Locke said he had not heard reports of any significant damage.
One area of concern is the potential damage to the extensive oil and gas industry in the region.
Earthquakes in the Permian Basin to the south have been linked to industrial activity associated with drilling for oil, such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves injecting large quantities of contaminated, salty water deep underground.
"All of those companies, especially the pipeline companies, they do have earthquake protocols, and they will go check lines around the epicenter and check pressure in their lines, things like that," Locke said. "They do have earthquake plans."
Damage to the oil and gas industry is also an area of concern for Hansfield County Sheriff Bob Mahaffee, who serves a neighboring county in the region.
"Our main concern is the pipelines," Mahaffee said. "The companies are doing their pressure checks and everything they do to make sure the lines are normal."
Earthquakes in Texas are not uncommon. However, their intensity has increased over the past six years.
According to data from the USGS, 85% of the earthquakes registering 2.5 or greater in magnitude have take place since 2020.
Locke said earthquakes are rare in his county, which doesn't have a protocol for what to do when they take place.
"We have an emergency operation plan that covers all of our, you know, consistent emergencies whether that is fires or tornados, flooding, things like that,” he said. “We do not have an earthquake portion of it."
Locke said he had heard “unconfirmed reports of some cracked drywall.”
“Right now, it's a few pictures falling off the wall and lots of shaking," he said.
Mahaffee said his neighboring county has a lake with a dam, but because the lake is dry, he had no way of telling right away if there was structural damage from the earthquake.
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