Libby feels quake from almost 200 miles away

Libby residents reported feeling the impact of an early Thursday earthquake centered almost 175 air miles away in Lincoln, Montana.

“(It) shook our log cabin for at least 30 seconds (and) made a crystal I have hanging in window spin violently,” posted Joan Best on Facebook, who wrote she lives three miles south of Libby. “Then a few minutes later we had an aftershock.”

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit at 12:30 a.m. Thursday about six miles southeast of Lincoln, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A magnitude 4.9 quake rattled the same general area about five minutes later.

The USGS noted seven other quakes ranging from magnitude 3.5 to 4.4 over the next hour. Two others followed, with the most recent being a 3.6 quake at 7:15 a.m.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or serious damage, but patrons at the Wilderness Bar in Lincoln headed for the doors as stools and glass bottles started falling over and food was knocked off grocery store shelves in Lincoln and Helena.

Erika Macy of Libby posted on Facebook that she was in Great Falls helping her sister pack when the quake hit.

“She’s on the second floor of a three-story house and the ceiling shook,” she wrote. “I thought it was going to collapse on us.”

Back in Libby, Becca Louise posted that she at first thought the shaking earth was caused by a train passing through.

“It quickly became clear there was no train,” she wrote. “It was an intense rumble that shook the house. (It) reminded me of the kind of shock I felt realizing I was in a tornado.”

The USGS received reports of people feeling the earthquake throughout Montana and in parts of Idaho, Washington and Wyoming.

Mike Stickney, a seismologist at the Earthquake Studies Office with the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology in Butte, said the quake was probably the strongest in Montana since October 1964 and was located along the axis of the intermountain seismic belt.

Stickney does not believe the quake is seismically linked to the recent swarm of more than 1,100 smaller earthquakes in and around Yellowstone National Park over the past two weeks.

There have been more than 70 quakes measuring larger than 4.5 in Montana and parts of Wyoming and Idaho since 1925, according to the USGS. The largest quake in Montana history was magnitude 7.2 near West Yellowstone in 1959.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.