EASTERN PLAINS — It sounded like thunder or an explosion to Mary Breslin, a retiree who was making dinner at her home in Eads Sunday evening when she felt the rolling tremors.
“It was a little scary. I mean, we went outside to look and see if something really bad had happened,” Breslin said. “I really thought it was an explosion. It did not occur to me in the beginning that it was an earthquake.”
A quake registering 3.9 on the Richter scale started at 6:22 p.m. just 9 miles east of Breslin’s small town and was felt as far away as Colorado Springs, according to data from the United States Geological Survey.
While the Front Range has a lengthy history of minor earthquakes, Eastern Colorado rarely sees seismic activity from a handful of epicenters in the Arkansas and Platte river valleys, the Survey says.
The most powerful earthquake on record in Colorado happened in 1882 west of Fort Collins and is thought to have registered as a 6.6 on the Richter scale.
