SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — From the Atlanta suburbs to the coast, where a Savannah office building was evacuated after workers felt it swaying, people in Georgia reported sensing shudders and shakes Tuesday about the same time a 5.8-magnitude earthquake shook the Washington, D.C., area and sent tremors across the East Coast.
The U.S. Geological Survey said more than two dozen people in Georgia reported feeling the quake up to 500 miles from the epicenter.
In downtown Savannah, more than 50 city employees in a five-story office building next to City Hall evacuated after workers reported they felt the upper floors swaying for several seconds.
"It shook for a while," said Garrison Marr, Savannah's housing sustainability coordinator, who works in the building's third floor. "There's actually a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall across from my desk. When I saw the fire extinguisher kind of swinging, that was my visual confirmation I wasn't just imagining it."
A structural engineer would take a close look at the building Wednesday, but an initial inspection by city engineers Tuesday found no cracks in the 19th-century building's stucco façade or in the door frames, said city spokesman Bret Bell. Employees were allowed to return to work after about 45 minutes.
Tucker resident Mikausa Spencer said she was sitting in her kitchen Tuesday afternoon when the floor began vibrating.
"I could see the pots and pans shaking a little," said the nurse, who said she thought at first that the tremors could be ominous. "I was like, 'Oh my gosh, we're under attack.'"
In the Atlanta suburbs, software designer Brent Neill said his two-story office building in Duluth "just started shaking." He said other workers in the building saw doors shaking on their hinges.
In middle Georgia, Marsha Herren felt the earth shake at her family herb farm a few miles west of Milledgeville.
She said she and a friend were sitting in the living room when the earth moved.
"The whole house did," she said. "We were just talking and all of a sudden it's like the whole house settled, the roof and everything. A lamp that hangs started swinging."
Geologist Julian Gray with Georgia's Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville said the museum's seismograph recorded the quake. He said an earthquake of 5.8 magnitude could be felt for several hundred miles away, and noted at least one staff member at the museum felt the tremors.
Clark Alexander, a geologist with the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, said he suspects Georgia would be near the limit of how far south people could feel the quake. While the northeast tends to be rockier and better suited to transmit quake vibrations, he said, underground rock layers in the South often lie beneath sandy soils that muffle earthquake energy.
In other words, Alexander suspects the earthquake would be felt further to the north of its epicenter than it would be to the south.
"It's always possible because people have different sensitivity," Alexander said. "Based on the rule of thumb for how far away you feel an earthquake, this is a little bit distant for an earthquake of this size. It's a little bit up in the air."
Savannah police spokeswoman Gena Moore said no 911 calls were made regarding the quake. Atlanta police Lt. Curtis Davenport said he wasn't aware of any calls there either.
While the Federal Aviation Administration reported air traffic delays at some major East Coast airports, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport spokeswoman Katena Carvajales, said Tuesday afternoon there were no delays at that airport as a result of the earthquake.
Associated Press writers Dorie Turner, Greg Bluestein, Jeff Martin and Don Schanche in Atlanta contributed to this story.
