(from newspaper: The St. Catharines Standard - Saturday Sept. 26, 1998)

    Floors and walls shook, mirrors broke and pets went crazy in Niagara Friday as a moderate earthquake rolled through southern Ontario.
    "I was saying my afternoon prayers when suddenly the bed began to shake," said Wendy McDonald, 45, who lives on the top floor of an apartment building on Welland Avenue in St. Catharines.  "I looked around and the walls and floor were shaking."
    "I've just moved in, so luckily I didn't have any pictures on the walls or anything that could break," she said.
    Cathy Wood-Gold , a seismologist at the Geological Survey of Canada, said the earthquake's epicentre was near Sharon, Pa., near the Ohio border.  It struck at 3:54 p.m. and registered 5.4 on the Richter scale.  Tremors could be felt as far away as London and Toronto.
    "This is enough to cause some minor damage near the centre," she said, noting appreciable damage begins with a rating of 6.0.
    No serious damage or injuries have been reported, but Friday's tremors tripped alarms at the Niagara Detention Centre in Thorold, which Niagara Regional Police briefly mistook for a break-out.
    Beverly Sheremetta of St. George Street in St. Catharines, who is recovering from a head injury after a car accident, was left disoriented when her apartment began to tremble.
    "I was practising (a physiotherapy exercise) when everything began to shake and a mirror fell off the wall," she said.
    "At first I thought I was seeing it because of my injuries, but sure enough it was an earthquake."
    Donald Pollick of Jordan said he was unknowingly warned of the tremors by his cat.
    "I was sitting in a chair with the cat in my lap when she suddenly leapt up and ran around the house, which is pretty strange," he said.  "Not more than five minutes later, the house began to rock."
    Niagara-on-the-Lake geologist and novelist Bob James said the shaking of his roof sounded like a large animal was scampering over his house.
    "It sounded like a massive raccoon had jumped on the roof and was running around," he said.
    Two major fault lines cross through southern Ontario into the United States.  One extends from Lake Scugog in the north, through Pickering and St. Catharines and across to Lake Erie.
    The second fault line follows the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, crosses Lake Ontario and extends to Attica, N.Y.
    James said the size of this quake should be enough to worry those living in these regions.
    "We had a quake in (1986) in the same area, and (Friday's) was of greater force."
    This, he said, may be indicative of increased pressure on the fault line, meaning the next quake will be even stronger.
    James is not alone in this view.  On Monday, former government geologist Joe Wallach published an article in the Emergency Preparedness Digest, suggesting there is a "better than reasonable possibility of having a big earthquake occur" in southern Ontario.
    Not all scientists concur, however.  Wood-Gold said it is extremely diffictult to predict the size of future earthquakes.
"There are those who try to look at the pattern of quakes and predict what will happen in the future," she said.
"But when we look at the data statistically, we find past earthquakes and present ones may have no link at all."
    Furthermore, said Wood-Gold, southern Ontario is only a moderately active earthquake zone compared to areas such as California.
    The San Francisco earthquake of October 1989 that collapsed bridges and killed more than 60 people was measured at nearly 7.0 on the Richter scale.
    The open-ended Richter scale begins at zero and each point signifies a 10-fold increase in strength.
    The last earthquake to rattle through southern Ontario, in January 1986, was measured at 5.0.