A 3.6-magnitude earthquake has been confirmed near a small village in Putnam County Wednesday morning, officials said.

There were no reports of injuries but about 120 people reported feeling it, according to the U. S. Geological Survey.

The quake happened at 4:41 a.m. about 2 ¹⁄₂ miles south of Standard, in Putnam County, said the USGS. It did not occur along a fault line, according to a USGS spokesman.

Standard is located about 110 miles southwest of Chicago.

The temblor occurred about 2.9 miles below the Earth’s surface, the USGS said. The deeper in the earth it occurs the less it’s felt, according to USGS spokesman Patrick Wilson.

Typically anything below 11 kilometers deep is relatively deep. “This was listed at 4.6,” Wilson said. “It was definitely a shallow one.”

Administrative Lt. Doug Bernabei with the Peru Police Department, located several miles north of Standard, said he was making coffee when his house shook. Suspecting it might be a quake, he turned on his police radio and heard numerous calls coming into 911 dispatch from residents.

“We received voluminous amounts of 911 calls. It was literally one call after another,” he said. “It shook my house. It wasn’t a rattle, I thought something hit the house. A lot of people were waking up.”

Bernabei said he had not heard of any reports of damage because of the quake. He said Illinois Valley Regional Dispatch based in Peru and which covers several north-central Illinois communities received many dozens of calls from residents who felt the quake.

Those who submitted reports saying they’d felt it were in the nearby towns of Peru, Lasalle, Granville, Mendota, and Oglesby and Spring Valley, according to Wilson. Two were from the Chicago-area. 

Bill Pasulka, who lives in the country just outside of Standard, said the shaking woke him up.

“I looked at the clock when my bed shook and it was 4:41 a.m.,” he said. “It felt like I had a waterbed!”

Pasulka, who lives in a house that was built in 1860, said he’s never experienced an earthquake before. 

“At first I was fearing that it was a tree that collapsed on the house,” he said. 

When he got to work everybody had felt it.

“There was no damage - just shaking….about a second and a half,” Pasulka said.

Kerry Shelley, of Earlville, said she, her children and her dogs were also all awoken by the shaking but did not know the cause until she checked Facebook this morning. Shelley, who thought maybe one of her dogs had bumped into the bed, shared video footage taken in her basement, of the quake.

Another resident who lives closer to town said it was loud.

“It was just like an explosion,” he said. “The windows vibrated and everything shook.”

Though Janice Holst, who lives about 5 miles away in the village of Mark, didn’t feel a thing, her pup “Brunie,” a Great Pyrenees Lab mix, definitely did.  

“He started barking like the house was getting robbed,” Holst said.

An earthquake is what happens when two blocks of the earth suddenly slip past one another and the surface where they slip is called the fault or fault plane, according to the USGS. The location below the earth’s surface where the earthquake starts is called the hypocenter, and the location directly above it on the surface of the earth is called the epicenter, said the USGS.

A USGS earthquake map indicated that the shaking may have extended into parts southern Wisconsin, southeastern Iowa and northwest Indiana.

Randy Simpson, a dispatcher for Illinois Valley Regional Dispatch Center, said dispatchers on duty at the time received numerous calls from people who felt the ground shaking or the noise of their homes rattling. There were no reports of damage, he said.

Simpson, who lives in Mendota about 16 miles north of Standard, said he was watching TV and didn’t feel the quake. But a friend who lives in the same community texted him to say he had just felt an earthquake and that his house shook.

“He said, ‘Did you feel that?’ And I was like ‘Feel what?’” Simpson said.

In June 2021, residents in New Lenox, Tinley Park and Homewood reported feeling a magnitude 3.8 quake centered near Bloomingdale, Indiana.

In June 2016, a small earthquake measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale was felt in the northwest suburbs. It was centered about a mile west of Lake in the Hills.

Weak or light shaking was felt in parts of Crystal Lake, Lake in the Hills, Huntley, Union Woodstock, Wonder Lake and as far away as Elgin, according to the USGS website.

In that same month, residents in Chicago and surrounding suburbs reported feeling shaking from a light earthquake in Michigan. The 4.2-magnitude earthquake was centered about 9 miles southeast of Kalamazoo, Michigan. The USGS received reports from people who felt it in Chicago and as well as Evanston, Carol Stream, Romeoville, Joliet, Carpentersville, McHenry and Dundee.

Contributing: The Associated Press

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