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Historian recalls Ohio's strongest earthquake
Friday, April 18, 2008
ANNA — When two earthquakes, including Ohio's strongest, shook Anna in March 1937, the school bore the brunt of the damage and eventually had to be torn down.
During the remainder of the 1936-37 school year, students had classes in the parlors of homes.
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The damaged school's public-address system was removed and strung from home to home, said Paul Workman of Anna, a retired Shelby County music teacher who in the early 1970s found film footage of the 1937 quake's aftermath.
He has since become the unofficial tremor historian for Ohio's "earthquake capital."
The footage shows several images, including classes being held in homes, the school's damaged gymnasium, and footage of students playing in a street that was closed off so it could be used as a playground.
School was held in barracks heated by pot-bellied stoves during the 1937-38 school year. The new school, which opened in 1938 and remains in use today, has overbuilt footers. It was paid for with $30,000 in earthquake insurance money.
Workman said he, too, has earthquake insurance, though many Anna property owners don't.
Prior to the March 9 earthquake, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake on March 2 had caused damage to the school, causing the cancellation of classes for the remainder of that week, Workman said.
Although few seismographs were available back then, the U.S. Geological Survey assigned a 5.4 magnitude to it based on the felt area of the damage that occurred in Anna and surrounding communities, according to the Ohio Seismic Network.
That's stronger than the 5.2 earthquake that was felt in this region Friday.
The 1937 earthquake's epicenter was in Anna.
"It damaged or knocked down every chimney in town," said Michael Hansen, coordinator of the Ohio Seismic Network coordinated by the Division of Geological Survey of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Windows broke, merchandise was knocked off store shelves and the brick Anna School needed to be torn down.
"It was a considerable earthquake," said Hansen, who was awakened Friday morning not by the earthquake felt in Ohio at 5:38 a.m. but by a cell phone call from a Dayton man two minutes later.
"He said, 'I think we've had an earthquake, everything just shook,' " said Hansen, who can access seismic stations from his computer at home.
By the time he fired up his computer, he said, "the phone was ringing off the hook."
