Norman Residents React to Earthquake

By Jacqueline Sit, News 9

NORMAN, Oklahoma – Residents in and around the epicenter of Wednesday's earthquake are reacting to the quake.

Heidi Etchieson lives in the Clear Bay area south of Lake Thunderbird. That's about half a mile west of the earthquake's epicenter. At 9:06 Wednesday morning she was sitting in her house doing some work.

"All of a sudden I heard a loud explosion, and the whole house shuddered," she said.

Etchieson said she had no damage to her house. She's never lived through an earthquake before and hopes she never does again.

"I hope this was the only one," she said.

"I thought a truck hit the side of the building," Sherry Sager, a store clerk at The Corner Store in Norman said.

A surveillance video inside the store showed no activity but an outside camera facing the gas pumps showed a slow rocking motion from the earthquake that lasted for 10 seconds.

"My phone has been ringing off the hook," said Sager. "Being in the country, a lot of people were calling to check on me. There were all kinds of stories from people walking in, one woman says she was in a dentist chair when that happened, a man said he was in a deer blind. "This really felt like the Murrah Bombing and it scared me."

Sager said she's glad it wasn't anything serious and hopes no one got hurt.

It wasn't a typical morning for a sports vlogger in Norman either. He said he was more surprised and shocked than scared.

"Let's go ahead and begin with a Thursday night game with the Big 12, a Kansas State play…[earthquake rattles computer camera]...we just had an earthquake."

Dan Reed was recording his weekly college football predictions on YouTube when he said what sounded like a train or a bomb came through his neighborhood.

"You have a vision of what your day is going to be like, you have a general idea. Earthquakes, especially if you live in Oklahoma, is not on your menu, you just don't foresee something like that happening," the vlogger said.

Reed said he's getting hundreds of hits on his video that's now gone viral.

More: Earthquake Felt Across Oklahoma