Columbia-area neighborhood becomes epicenter of 14 small earthquakes in 3 weeks

ELGIN - A Kershaw County gravel road with maybe a dozen homes, a large sand mine and a timber operation to the north, and a drag racing strip to the west have been South Carolina's earthquake epicenter since Christmas.

Green Hill Road, along Interstate 20 roughly 25 miles northeast from downtown Columbia, has been surrounded by a series of minor earthquakes - 14 in less than three weeks - the most to shake the Midlands in decades.

After the second tremor on Dec. 27, Joe Mulero told his wife, Brenda, to call their insurance company about adding an earthquake policy. But with the high deductible required, they decided to take their chances.

When the first and largest quake - 3.3 in magnitude - struck, a friend who lives down the road in the area from the Muleros texted asking the family if they were OK.

"I said, 'We're in Five Points. We didn't feel a thing,' " Joe Mulero said.

Earthquakes below a 2.5 magnitude are common and so small people generally don't realize anything happened. Those of a magnitude of 2.5 to 5.4, like the one that shook the Muleros' home, are felt but cause only minor damage, if any at all.

More than 3,000 Columbia-area residents reported feeling tremors, though there were no injuries or damage reported to the state Emergency Management Division or Richland County Sheriff's Department.

Mulero's two daughters were home when the first tremor hit. Christmas decorations fell from their mantle, their tree and a banister running up the stairs.

"They were a little freaked out," Joe Mulero said.

Brenda Mulero snapped pictures of the decorations hanging askew from the banister for the family scrapbook thinking the quake would just be a singular memory.

Then came the second one three hours later. Another 11 tremors, most below the level where they could be felt, have occurred in the area between Elgin and Lugoff, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In the United States, South Carolina is one of only two places east of the Mississippi River with a history of large quakes.

The other is the New Madrid Fault Line, which runs along the Mississippi and affects residents in Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas, said Steven Jaume, a seismologist and associate professor of geology at the College of Charleston.

"These sort of things do happen every now and then," Jaume said. "They're always going on. People just don't often feel them because they're just not large enough."

When the second quake hit, the Muleros all stared at each other from across the room. Joe Mulero thought a car might have hit the house.

The quakes continued to come and the loud booms they've made seem to come in a wave. Mulero said he heard it rumble in and then echo away.

"I don't know if you get used to that," he said.

And with every boom, the Mulero family cat, Tiger, jumped up and ran in circles before freezing, petrified on stiff legs.

When the Muleros moved to the rural Elgin neighborhood 15 years ago from Blythewood, they saw their fair share of natural disasters. A tornado swept through down the road and passed between the home of one of their friends and a neighbor.

In 2015, the historic floods came and Green Hill Road flowed with brown, ankle-deep water.

Earthquakes were the last thing they expected to happen.

"You always think it's in Charleston," Joe Mulero said, having seen the earthquake bolts in The Battery.

After all, the Lowcountry was the epicenter for the largest earthquake ever recorded on the East Coast.

On Aug. 31, 1886, a 7.3-magnitude quake leveled most of the brick buildings in Charleston and Summerville, the epicenter, igniting fires and overrunning hospitals. At least 60 people died and many reported feeling the wave over 2.5 million square miles up and down the Eastern Seaboard and west to the Mississippi River, according to the state Emergency Management Division.

While earthquakes are less common in the Midlands than in the Lowcountry, a major fault - the Eastern Piedmont fault system - still runs through the area, Jaume said.

Scientists are not alarmed by the apparent recent uptick in seismic activity, saying it falls in line with historic trends.

"You mean those little shakes?" joked Todd and Kim Davis, a pair of teachers who recently moved to Green Hill Road from Salt Lake City.

Growing up in Utah near Hill Air Force Base, Kim Davis at first thought the earthquake was a sonic boom, like the ones she used to hear from jets at the base.

She came out of the house to ask her husband if he'd felt the shake.

"Is this normal?" Kim Davis posted to her church group online. She was answered with a resounding "no."

Having spent stints in the West, the couple said they were no stranger to quakes.

Kim Davis said after some of the larger quakes on the West Coast, the lights would swing and she'd be overcome with a dizzy sensation. They often lasted longer, too.

Todd Davis remembers, during one quake in his childhood, his father grew angry and asked which of his brothers was shaking his chair.

And when he worked for Nike in Portland, the building was constructed on rollers to help it stand up to such events.

But the couple has never been on top of the epicenter until now.

"It sounded like dynamite," Kim Davis said.

They thought it might have been a training drill at nearby Fort Jackson, where soldiers go through basic training drills that often involve explosions. Or maybe, they thought, it had come from the Unimin/Covia-owned sand mine.

That's what Josh Powell, another Green Hill Road resident, thought too when the first quake hit just as he had laid down on the couch to take a nap.

He called a friend of his who works at the mine, but the company hasn't blasted there for years.

Though the continuing series of quakes have been minor - the most recent coming Jan. 11, 1.74 in magnitude - Josh Powell and his family had never experienced them before now.

"It felt pretty big even being that small," Liz Powell said.