Three-second earthquake rattles area

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CHICAGO - A brief earthquake struck the Midwest early Monday, rattling windows and awakening sleeping residents from Wisconsin south to Missouri and from southwestern Michigan west to Iowa. No injuries were reported from the quake, which occurred about 1:11 a.m. Brian Lassige, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado, said the quake was magnitude 4.5, and its epicenter was about eight miles northwest of Ottawa in northern Illinois, close to the small village of Troy Grove. The rural area is about 70 miles west of Chicago. Northern Illinois University's Paul Stoddard, an associate professor in the Geology and Environmental Geosciences Department, said the quake was likely not directly caused by either of two local known fault lines, the Sandwich Fault and the Plum River Fault. The geological survey said the three-second quake occurred at a depth of 3.1 miles in a structure associated with the Sandwich Fault Zone. It was not connected with the New Madrid Fault further south, which has been responsible for the Midwest's most serious earthquakes. Lassige said earthquakes in that area are rare, but have occurred before. He said quakes have been recorded there in 1881, 1912 and 1972. The most recent confirmed quake in northern Illinois was in 1985 in LaGrange and measured about 3.0 in magnitude, Stoddard said. "It's not unexpected," Stoddard said about last night's quake. But, he added, "It's not a harbinger of bigger, worse things to come." Initial reports indicated no major damage from the quake, although police agencies and radio stations within the quake area were inundated with telephone calls. "It was mayhem around here for a while," said Pattie Burke, a dispatcher for the Ottawa Police. "We had more than 200 calls from residents in a short period of time, all of them wanting to know what had happened. A lot of them seemed to think a truck had crashed into their house. "Here in the station, it felt like an aircraft was about to crash right here." Sandwich Police dispatcher Nancy Holcomb said the department got between 60 and 70 calls after the earthquake hit. Some callers said "they felt the tremor and thought something could hit the house," she said. DeKalb Police also reported getting a spate of calls. Many residents of southern DeKalb County reported feeling effects of the quake. Bev Schuck of Sandwich was awake and preparing to go to work at Casey's General Store on Route 34 in Sandwich when the quake hit. Schuck said bottles in her fridge and pots and pans rattled and the quake created a "rolling rumble" sound. She said she thought there was a problem with the gas line. "I thought the house was going to blow up," Schuck said. Anna Henrich of Sandwich woke up in the middle of night to what she said she thought was a train accident. "It sounded like metal against metal," Henrich said. She said her husband slept through it but she couldn't get back to sleep. "I was wondering what on earth happened," Henrich said. Gail Walz of Sheridan also woke up to a loud noise and her home shaking. "It sounded like a truck or a train and it got the dogs barking," she said. Walz, who works at McCaslin Bakery on Route 34 in Sandwich, said the quake didn't knock any bread off the racks. Workers at Art's Supermarket on Eddy Road said they didn't find any grocery items knocked on to the floor when they opened this morning. The quake was felt at three nuclear power plants in Illinois: Quad Cities, LaSalle and Dresden. Craig Nesbit, a spokesman for the Exelon Corp., which owns the three generating stations, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared an "unusual alert" for all of them, although there appeared to be no damage. "All of them were operating 100 percent, and no problems were reported, but we did a check of all safety systems," Nesbit said. Nesbit said the three stations supply electrical power for several million Illinois residents. Reports of the shaking came from at least as far east as Valparaiso, Ind., and as far west as the Quad Cities, and from Wisconsin in the north to the St. Louis area in the south. Gary Spaulding of Marseilles, Ill., said he was relaxing in his mobile home when the quake struck. "It was like somebody shot off dynamite," said Spaulding, who added that his cat leaped out of his lap and would still not come near him two hours later. "I thought maybe a tree hit my trailer," Spaulding said. "I've got a dead tree in my yard." Jeff Biesemeier of Freeport, Ill., said his whole house "was just vibrating." Joe Knapp of Delafield, Wis., just west of Milwaukee, said he was asleep and awoke when the bed began shaking. "Everything was just rolling back and forth," Knapp said. Chronicle staff Paul Mikolajczyk and Chris Rickert contributed to this report.