Magnitude 4.8 natural disaster shakes Victoria, B.C.

“We had some things that fell off the shelves and walls… picture frames, a platter that fell off a shelf and broke”, Moore said. “It was the strongest in quite some time here”. Edmond police received about 15 reports of alarms going off at homes and businesses in the minutes after the quake.

“Soil will alter the shaking”, he says.

Nikolas Dahl was at a movie in Vancouver when he felt the shaking.

One of the largest earthquakes more than a decade shook Victoria, B.C. and portions of Western Washington.

The Canadian agency said there were no reports of damage, adding that none would be expected. “These deep earthquakes tend to have very few or, most often, no aftershocks”, says Cassidy.

According to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, this is the largest quake in the Northwest region since 2004, when a magnitude 4.9 natural disaster hit near Newport, Oregon.

Authorities on the Island and in Vancouver posted messages on social media asking people not to call 911 about the quake unless there was an emergency.

British Columbia sits on what’s known as the Cascadia subduction zone, where earthquakes tend to occur either within the Juan de Fuca plate or the overriding North America plate.

SkyTrain’s Expo and Millennium lines were shut down for approximately an hour as a safety precaution to ensure the elevated guideways were not damaged by the tremors.

The National Tsunami warning centre says there is no risk of a Tsunami for coastal areas.

BC Hydro said it had not detected any quake damage and there were no disruptions to transmission and distribution systems.

There was also a separate magnitude 4.4 quake on Sunday near San Bernardino, Calif.