Small earthquake shakes Summerville, surrounding areas

Shaking walls, rattling shelves and a boom sound startled many residents of Goose Creek, Summerville and Ladson as they began their day.

The U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Center recorded a quake with preliminary magnitude of 3.6 at 7:42 a.m. Soon, more than 200 reports about the quake began flowing into the Survey's National Earthquake Center.

"It has been felt in the general area," geophysicist Jessica Sigala said. "We probably won't see damage with this."

Carrie Ann Bedwell, another geophysicist at the Earthquake Center, said the quake was located about 10 miles east southeast of Summerville.

Michelle Kaneff has been helping her 12-year-old son get ready for school in their home in Goose Creek's Devon Forest subdivision when she heard a loud rumbling.

"He pointed to the wall and you could see the whole house shifting to the left-hand side and it came right back," she said. "Within a couple seconds it had stopped."

The quake rattled a lot of people. Neighbors in the Scott's Mill community in Summerville gathered in the street to see what happened. People reported the noise as sounding and feeling like a tree falling on the house or a car striking it.

Few injuries and no real damage was reported on Tuesday not so surprising for the relatively modest quake. Dorchester County Emergency Medical workers took a one-year old with a cut on the head to the hospital after the child fell off a stool during the quake. Also in the Summerville area, a 32-year-old woman called for emergency help and reported falling but did not go to the hospital, said Doug Warren, EMS director.

The quake was the first sizable temblor since a 4.1 quake in 1995 shook houses and cracked driveways in Summerville. But a dozen or more quakes too small to notice happen most years in the Lowcountry.

The most devastating earthquake in Charleston struck in 1886, killing more than 100 people and injuring some 500.

The 7.3 magnitude temblor came from the Woodstock fault just before 10 p.m. on an August night. Two-thirds of the brick buildings in Charleston were destroyed or nearly destroyed; all the buildings in Summerville, within a few miles of the epicenter, were at least damaged.

The fault is actually two rifts in the rock deep underground, one traveling roughly from the ACE Basin almost to Lake Moultrie, the other traveling roughly along the Ashley River. They open on each other underneath the river somewhere around Middleton Place.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.