Residents react to Delaware quake

Hundreds of Dover residents stood at City Hall to take in the holiday festivities just hours after a 4.1 magnitude earthquake occurred ten miles northeast of the city at the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge.

Some say the rumblings went on for a solid minute, while Magnolia residents said they didn't feel anything. 

"We just looked at each other and was like, 'what was that,' recalled Dover resident Samantha Cahall.

Lincoln Willis works across the street from City Hall, and says he thought the roof might have been caving in.

"My building is a great building, but it's 150-years-old.  So I was like, 'maybe the roof is falling in and maybe I had better get out of here.'"

Geologist Bart Wilson, who works at the Bombay Hook Refuge, says his first thought was there might have been a situation to the south of the city.

"Did something happen at the air force base.  And then we kind of realized, when our neighbors said they felt the same thing, we kind of said in the back of our mind like, oh, could've been an earthquake."

Wilson says tectonic plate action that formed the Appalachian Mountains 400-500 million years ago may be the cause of the rumbles.

"It also created a lot of faults.  So it's those faults that are very old, but they can still be active, and usually it's not going to create huge earthquakes like in California, but we can still get a rumble like this."

Wilson says though he does not remember the last Delaware earthquake that caused the ground beneath to shake, that does not mean tectonic activity is completely dormant.

"I can't even remember the last recorded earthquake that we've had, we probably have little rumbles that we never feel.  You can have magnitude 1 or 2 that you never feel, but the seismographs up in the Delaware Geographic Survey in Newark may pick up.  So it's always there and you may not even realize it."

In the end, with no damage reported, Wilson says it was a fun event to experience.

"Me being a geologist I get a little excited about it, it's obviously it's minor, there's no damage, but it's still a little thrilling.  You're like alright it's fun to see some geology happening in action."