It's the big one! Quick, someone grab the dominoes!
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
A guy leaves Texas for a week, and what happens?
You might miss a compound standoff.
Not only that, you might miss an earthquake.
I have no idea what's happening out west at the Yearn for Zion Ranch, but I can report that the shakeup has ended in South Texas, where a 3.7-magnitude earthquake rattled the kitchen kolache pans before dawn Monday in Karnes County.
"If it had been later in the day, we'd have had some domino games shook up good," said Sheriff David Jalufka, a descendant of the Czech families that settled South Central Texas along with Germans.
He was talking by phone Tuesday from the Sheriff's Department, where deputies had documented the earthquake damage as zero. A few ceiling tiles shook at the local hospital, he said.
The small earthquake was the third in recent years in a part of Karnes and Atascosa counties formerly known for uranium mining, he said.
"Nothing out there but open country," he said. "I guess a few hours later, it might have shook some coffee cups. But it didn't even wake anybody up. There wasn't much to shake."
The quake was miles from oil and gas fields, Jalufka said, discounting comments by a University of Texas scientist who said the quakes might be caused by recent drilling and mineral extraction.
Cliff Frohlich, co-author of Texas Earthquakes, stuck to his comments to Houston and Victoria newspapers.
"If you look at all the earthquakes in Texas, about half of them have been in or very close to oil and gas fields," he said, noting a 4.0-magnitude earthquake in 1932 near Mexia during oil-field drilling.
On the other hand, North Texas has never had even a tiny earthquake near a drilling site, despite a nearly 90-year history north and west of Fort Worth.
This area's worst earthquake was a little 3.3-magnitude shake between Denton and Gainesville in 1985, barely enough to rattle the animal cages at the Gainesville zoo.
Even Frohlich said he's not worried about our Barnett Shale gas drilling.
"These are all very small events," he said. "Only a few feet away, you would hardly feel them. If I owned land with the potential for minerals, I wouldn't hesitate to drill."
The worst jolts ever in North Texas weren't even the result of earthquakes in Texas. Scientists are certain that a 6.5-magnitude earthquake in Missouri in 1811 gave Texas a shock felt only by the Native American tribes and the state's 5,000 or so Spanish settlers.
Our biggest jolt of modern times came in 1952 thanks to a quake west of Oklahoma City.
According to news accounts, a squall line was moving through North Texas that morning. Tornado warnings had been announced.
When office buildings started shaking, hundreds of residents started calling police.
That 5.5-magnitude earthquake was felt for five minutes in Texas and 25 minutes near the epicenter, in El Reno, Okla. Workers in Wichita Falls ran screaming from offices, and a Dallas newspaper reported it as the most frightening event since the World War II attack on Pearl Harbor.
Early reports measured damage -- including a crack in the Oklahoma state Capitol -- but only one injury: a Tulsa woman hit by falling plaster.
The Sooner State has a lot of smaller quakes that don't bother anybody.
For example, did you feel a 2.4-magnitude earthquake on Feb. 15? It was about 100 miles north of Fort Worth, far closer than the Karnes County quake Monday.
"We've had earthquakes right in the middle of Oklahoma City," said Jim Lawson, chief geophysicist at the Oklahoma Geological Survey office near Tulsa.
A couple of years ago, one in suburban Del City was reported by 1,200 witnesses.
"The total damage was zero," he said.
In a state covered in wells, he sees no connection to the earthly unrest. "My feeling is that oil and gas production is not connected in any way to these earthquakes," he said.
But maybe dominoes.
bud@star-telegram.com
