I’m in SW Oklahoma (the epicenter was north central OK) and this is the first one that I felt. I was in bed. At first, I thought that the cats were tearing through the house. Then the house started swaying. It seemed like it lasted about 10 seconds. Kind of cool actually.
My wife and I were living in Aptos for the Loma Prieta quake. Les than 3 miles from the epicenter.
My wife was home, I was at work about 30 miles away straight line. Still almost knocked me off my feet.
5.6 in an area that isn’t expecting an earthquake is nothing to sneeze at. Structures in California are built and outfitted in anticipation of shaking, and people generally know what to do before (e.g., properly mount your TV) and during (e.g., don’t go running around the house like a headless chicken) an earthquake.
Best fajitas I’ve ever had were in Topeka. Just sayin’.
I do find it surprising that this one would be felt over so large an area, though. Aren’t they usually a lot more localized than that?
Depends on the elasticity and density of the Earth’s crust around the epicenter plus the depth of the fault.
Midwest quakes come from deep underground. IIRC, this distributes the seismic waves further than West Coast quakes.
We had a small earthquake centered up in New Hampshire a few years ago, so I knew exactly what was going on with the OP. It was a very odd experience; it sounded like an invisible someone was trying to shake the patio doors open. I don’t think I’d be very interested in being much closer to the epicenter of one.
Funny thing is, I spent almost a year in California, at the Presidio of Monterey, and never felt an earth tremor. My first idea of what I felt was something in the sewers, maybe there had been an accident with gas pipelines and there was some kind of pressure blowback.
The scariest part about earthquakes for me are how they so easily show that the most solid reliable dependable surface we walk on, the earth, can turn to jelly and be deadly dangerous with almost no effort. It’s terrifying.
There has been a large increase in earthquakes since fracking started in Oklahoma. It now appears that Oklahoma has shutdown a bunch of wells since the most recent one.
Back in the late 60s, there were a series of earthquakes in Denver. I remember one which caused my office chair to roll across the floor. The problem was that the Army was pumping toxic chemicals into deep wells at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and this was lubricating the rocks and causing them to slip and slide.
Eventually, the Army drained the wells and did something with the chemicals and the earthquakes stopped.
While this is not the same thing as fracking, it amazes me that people forget things like that when it comes to making money.
Bob
Closer than I was! Still, the 10 collapsed two exits from my apartment. Northridge was the only earthquake I got out of bed for.
The best part about earthquakes for me is how they so easily show we inhabit a living planet. 
Fracking is pumping pressurized water into wells to fracture the formation and increase production. It’s a one time deal, done at the completion of the well.
But certain formations contain much more water than oil. The Mississippian in Oklahoma is one. All this water has to be dealt with, so it is pumped back down disposal wells. It can also be pumped down a different well to help push oil towards a producing well.
So “fracking” is a buzz word that gets people worked up (like “drone”), but disposal injection and water flood wells probably do a lot more to destabilize the various formations.
Used to be that wells were just drilled straight down. If the oil bearing formation was 3ft thick, then each well could only access a 3ft section of the formation. But with the advent of directional drilling, a well can be drilled down to the same 3ft thick formation, then turned horizontally to access many times more than the 3ft thickness. This put formations that were marginal or not worth it before, like the Mississippian, into play - they even call them “plays”. It’s pretty lopsided, like 1bbl of oil for every 100 (or more) barrels of water. And it’s extremely nasty water, very salty with oily scum in it, so it has to be disposed of.
Anyway, the article I saw said 37 disposal wells had been shut down, these are the wells that the produced salt water is pumped down.
It’s good that damage was minimal, but an earthquake being shallow isn’t a good thing. That means there’s less stuff in the way that might help dissipate some of the energy.
What scares me is unlike California, buildings in the Midwest aren’t built with Earthquakes in mind. They really need to rethink fracking.
Again, facking isn’t the root issue. Basically every oil well drilled in the modern era (cased bores) has been fracked. I attempted to explain it in simplistic terms a couple of posts up. For some reason the media has seized the work “fracking” as their rallying cry buzz word, but the 37 wells they shut in after the last earthquake weren’t “fracking”, they were salt water disposal wells.
The real boogeyman is the horizontal wells being drilled into marginal formations that are producing this huge amount of waste salt water - but that’s a mouthful compared to “fracking”.
We’re the horizontal wells fracked? Yes, just as basically every other traditional vertical well that’s been drilled for decades. There are a few free flowing wells, but chances are if it has a pump jack on it, it’s been fracked.
I realize that fighting ignorance takes a back seat to the evils of the oilfield, but at least the terminology should be more correct.
Didn’t feel a thing in Colorado. I wonder why we don’t get earthquakes living on a mountain. How did the mountain get here if not for lots of quakeage?
So, Baker, now that you have experienced an earthquake, how would rate it compared to tornadoes?
I grew up in Ohio before moving out here to CA. When I made it know I was coming out here, the response from people was, more often than not, express dread of earthquakes. Yet they seem to put up with cowering in their hidey holes during tornado warnings for hours at a time a dozen times a year. I much prefer the over-and-done-before-you-know-what-is-happening of earthquakes to that.
We get tornadoes pretty regularly around this area, and I’d take a 5.6 250 miles away every day 
And FWIW, thousands of oil wells around this area (since the 20’s), the vast majority have been fracked. No earthquakes, but horizontal directional drilling has just started within 100 miles in the last decade. And a lot of drilling in Colorado, east of the Rockies. Fairly certain those wells are fracked.
I have been through both a large earthquake (Loma Prieta), and two tornadoes. One tornado hit my house and the other one went straight over us while we were out driving and couldn’t get to shelter. The car lifted. Semi trucks a short way in front of us on the highway were flipped and stacked on each other.
I’ll take earthquakes any day of the week. In part because we build for them on the West Coast, and in part because the really big, damaging ones are relatively infrequent. A few seconds to a minute or so of shaking, and you’re done.
Tornadoes seem to do a lot more damage, large ones happen with frequency, and having been at ground zero for both, IMHO the tornadoes are much more frightening.
Tornadoes are extremely infrequent too. You were just very unlucky. Even in the deepest part of tornado alley in Oklahoma, they’re (IIRC) a several hundred year event at any given spot (and that counts little EF0s that last three seconds and have winds that, while high, are comparable to a regular thunderstorm).
I live in Ohio. Anybody who is cowering in a hidey hole for that long that frequently is just panicking above and beyond the actual risk. They’re probably the types to run out screaming over a little 3.0 tremor too.