SARANAC, Mich. (AP) - A western Michigan man dashed to his basement to confirm a weekend earthquake by checking his homemade seismograph.
Lyle Denny of Ionia County built his first machine in 2008, when he was teaching science to his son at home. He said he learned how to solder the circuits and “behold, it worked.”
“If the ground shakes, it moves. And this morning, it moved big time,” Denny said while showing the device to a WOOD-TV reporter Saturday (https://bit.ly/1zpnZxh ), after a 4.2-magnitude quake.
“I could feel it in the house,” Denny said. “I thought if I could feel it in the house, it’s gonna be significant. And it was.”
The epicenter was about 9 miles southeast of Kalamazoo, about an hour’s drive from Denny’s home near Saranac. The earthquake was felt in at least five states, but there were no reports of damage.
It’s considered the second-largest quake in Michigan in 100 years, according to experts at the University of Michigan.
Ben van der Pluijm, a geologist at the university, said the earthquake likely occurred in “basement” rocks that are more than 1.4 billion years old.
“We feel a lot of relatively small earthquakes in the state, but most of them occur to the south of Michigan,” seismologist Larry Ruff said. “So to have an earthquake of this magnitude with the epicenter in Michigan is very unusual.”
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Information from: WOOD-TV, https://www.woodtv.com
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