For a couple living in the epicenter, Sunday’s quake felt like an ‘airliner landing in the pasture’ | Nebraska

The seed merchant didn’t know what to think.

“Your mind tries to process everything. At first I thought I was going to look out the window and there would be an airliner landing in the pasture.

But the turmoil came from under their soil. Siebecker and his wife, Beth, live a few miles southwest of Superior across the Kansas border near Diamond Road and 200th in Jewell County.

And that, according to the US Geological Survey, was the epicenter of Sunday’s magnitude 3.7 earthquake. It followed a smaller earthquake – with a magnitude of 2.4 – 10 days earlier and 130 miles to the south near Junction City, Kansas.

Not a cause for concern, said Dan Blakeman, a Denver-based earthquake analyst with the Geological Survey.

“A lot of times in the United States we just have a small individual earthquake,” he said. “And just as often, I think, we have what we call a little swarm, multiple earthquakes in the same place. But none of this indicates that there is going to be a bigger earthquake.

Sunday’s quake originated about 3 miles below the surface, so it’s considered a shallow quake, like most in the eastern two-thirds of the country, Blakeman said.

“But the more superficial they are, of course, the more people are likely to feel it.”

And the Siebeckers felt it, for about 20 to 30 seconds. He knocked pictures off their shelves, smashing their frames. He shook the wall hangings.

It also scared their grandchildren.

“They were a little scared,” Steve Siebecker said. “It shook them.”