Lilesville hit with magnitude 1.8 earthquake

LILESVILLE — Just after 8 pm on Feb. 1, residents heard what sounded like a sonic boom.

“My husband [Scottie] felt it. The noise sounded like a bomb,” Lilesville resident Nancy Honeycutt said. “It rattled the windows in our laundry room.”

Anson had a small, magnitude 1.8 earthquake about three miles east of Lilesville and about 31 miles south of Albemarle. The earthquake did not cause any injuries or property damage, according to local emergency officials and weather experts.

WCNC-TV’s chief meteorologist Brad Panovich said the earthquake was the result of ancient faults deep in Earth’s crust.

“This area near Lilesville has not been very active like areas farther west or south and an M 1.8[earthquake] is very minimal,” he added. “It was very shallow at just 1.5 miles deep.”

Similar earthquakes in North Carolina create little to no impact and may occur in isolated areas which is why people don’t hear about them. They also occur on faults that are not as well known as those on the West Coast. The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality reports that statewide earthquakes are “small, random, and scattered events” while earthquakes out west gain attention because they are more damaging and frequent.

Seismic activity occurs in several areas near North Carolina, including the Charleston Seismic Zone, the Central Virginia Seismic Zone, the Giles County Seismic Zone, and the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone.

The rare event gained traction with several local weather trackers. Lilesville’s Douglas Ashe, storm spotter for the National Weather Service and operator of Doug’s Weather Page on Facebook, storm spotter Johnny Caudle, and Anson County Emergency Management Services Chief Rodney Diggs, each reported no damage or injuries in town resulting from the earthquake.