Earthquake Rocks Midland. Could You Feel It In Amarillo?

Out of all the different natural disaster types of phenomena, there's one you don't hear much about when it comes to Texas. We see tornadoes, we get surge storms, blizzards, etc.

But one thing we don't typically hear about is earthquakes. We hear about them in different places, usually California or somewhere else in the world. But when you hear about one happening in West Texas, you scratch your head.

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A pretty sizeable tremor rocked and rolled Midland on Friday evening, and it could apparently even be felt right here in Amarillo. The quake hit just after 5:30 pm and registered a strong 5.4 on the Richter scale.

When we hear about earthquakes, we don't typically pay attention unless it gets over six on the trusty scale. Those are the ones that can start causing some serious damage. A 5.4 in Texas though? That's worth paying attention to.

That 5.4 quake registers as the fourth strongest earthquake in Texas history, that's how infrequently they happen. The quake hit just 14 miles north-northwest of Midland and had a depth of 5.6 miles.

The depth refers to how deep the earthquake happened, so this particular one occurred 5.6 miles underneath the ground.

Geophysicist Jana Pursley at the USGS’s National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado said, “In that region such an event will be felt for a couple of hundred miles,” which is why there were reports of it being able to be felt in Amarillo.

Earthquakes in this region are typically due to oil and gas production, which we do plenty of here in Texas.