Earthquake rattles, shakes and wakes Putnam County — about 110 miles from Chicago

A 3.6-magnitude earthquake shook houses, rattled windows and woke up residents near a small village in Putnam County in north-central Illinois early Wednesday, prompting a flurry of 911 calls.

No injuries were reported, but about 120 people indicated they felt it, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake happened at 4:41 a.m. about 2 ¹⁄₂ miles south of Standard, in Putnam County, the agency said. It did not occur along a fault line, according to a spokesman.

“I looked at the clock when my bed shook, and it was 4:41 a..m.,” said Bill Pasulka, a Putnam County resident who was awakened by the quake. “It felt like I had a waterbed!”

Standard is located about 110 miles southwest of Chicago.

Pasulka lives just outside of Standard in a house that was built in 1860. He said he’s never experienced an earthquake before.

“At first I was fearing that it was a tree that collapsed on the house,” he said.

When he got to work, he said, everybody said they had felt it.

“There was no damage — just shaking … about a second and a half,” Pasulka said.

The temblor occurred about 2.9 miles below the Earth’s surface, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Earthquakes that take place deeper within the earth tend to be less noticeable at the surface, according to agency spokesman Patrick Wilson, adding that about 7 miles (11 kilometers) is considered relatively deep.

“It was definitely a shallow one,” Wilson said of the Putnam quake.

Doug Bernabei, an administrative lieutenant with the Peru Police Department, a few miles north of Standard, said he was making coffee when his house shook. Suspecting it might be a quake, he turned on his police radio and heard residents’ calls coming into 911 dispatch.

“We received voluminous amounts of 911 calls. It was literally one call after another,” he said. “It shook my house. It wasn’t a rattle, I thought something hit the house. A lot of people were waking up.”

Bernabei said he had not heard of any reports of damage because of the quake. He said Illinois Valley Regional Dispatch, based in Peru and which covers several north-central Illinois communities, received many dozens of calls from residents who felt the quake.

Reports from residents who felt the quake came from the towns of Peru, Lasalle, Granville, Mendota, Oglesby and Spring Valley, according to Wilson of the geological survey. Two were from the Chicago area.

The shaking woke up Earlville resident Kerry Shelley, her children and her dogs, but Shelley said she didn’t know the cause until she checked Facebook Wednesday morning. Shelley, who initially thought maybe one of her dogs had bumped into the bed, shared video footage of the quake taken in her basement.

Another resident who lives closer to town said it was loud.

“It was just like an explosion,” he said. “The windows vibrated and everything shook.”

Though Janice Holst, who lives about 5 miles away in the village of Mark, didn’t feel a thing, her pup “Brunie,” a Great Pyrenees Labrador mix, definitely did.

“He started barking like the house was getting robbed,” Holst said.

An earthquake is what happens when two blocks of the earth suddenly slip past one another, and the surface where they slip is called the fault or fault plane, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A U.S. Geological Survey earthquake map indicated that the shaking may have extended into parts of southern Wisconsin, southeast Iowa and northwest Indiana.

Randy Simpson, a dispatcher for Illinois Valley Regional Dispatch Center, said dispatchers on duty at the time received numerous calls from people who felt the ground shaking or the noise of their homes rattling. There were no reports of damage, he said.

Simpson, who lives in Mendota about 16 miles north of Standard, said he was watching TV and didn’t feel the quake. But a friend who lives in the same community texted him to say he had just felt an earthquake and that his house shook.

“He said, ‘Did you feel that?’ And I was like, ‘Feel what?’” Simpson said.

In June 2021, residents in New Lenox, Tinley Park and Homewood reported feeling a magnitude 3.8 quake centered near Bloomingdale, Indiana.

In June 2016, a small earthquake measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale was felt in the northwest suburbs. It was centered about a mile west of Lake in the Hills.

Weak or light shaking was felt in parts of Crystal Lake, Lake in the Hills, Huntley, Union Woodstock, Wonder Lake and as far away as Elgin in the 2016 earthquake, according to the USGS website.

In that same month, residents in Chicago and surrounding suburbs reported feeling shaking from a light earthquake in Michigan. The 4.2-magnitude earthquake was centered about 9 miles southeast of Kalamazoo, Michigan. The USGS received reports from people who felt it in Chicago and as well as Evanston, Carol Stream, Romeoville, Joliet, Carpentersville, McHenry and Dundee.

Contributing: The Associated Press