Esterhazy-area tremors a regular occurrence, says longtime resident

Despite a 4.1-magnitude earthquake hitting Esterhazy on Thursday night, a longtime resident of the area says quakes are a regular thing and the town is carrying on as normal.

“I think it’s just part of life. It’s good coffee-shop talk; nobody’s buildings are damaged,” Harvey Petrachek said Friday.

He has lived in the area for more than 40 years.

Regardless of the normalcy with which residents regard the frequent tremors, he said it feels like the tremors have grown stronger over time.

“We used to get phone calls from the (University of Saskatchewan) geology department in Saskatoon, and they’d inform us that we’d had a tremor,” he said. “Most of them at the time were between 2 and 3 (on the Richter scale).

“I would say that 40 years ago or more, we were getting those tremors back then.”

The United States Geological Survey confirmed Thursday’s quake and its 4.1 measurement, saying it happened 17 kilometres east of Esterhazy at 8:30 p.m.

Petrachek said it’s hard to determine the cause of the frequent tremors or of Thursday’s quake.

“I don’t know if it has been related to the mining (from Mosaic’s three potash mines in the area), or there apparently are some natural fault (lines) in the area that do shift, so one or the other, or a combination of both — we’re not sure,” he said.

He lives northwest of Esterhazy, near the village of Atwater. But he grew up on a farm between the K1 and K2 potash mines near Esterhazy.

Mosaic has three operational potash mines in the area, K1, K2 and K3.

Mosaic’s Sarah Fedorchuk said the company doesn’t yet know if its underground mining work or seismic shifts and movement in the earth’s crust caused the quake.

“It’s really not unusual to have some sort of mild seismic activity when you have mining in the area. Due to the ground makeup of this particular area, this region is prone to this type of seismic activity,” she said.

The company is trying to find the cause of the earthquake and how it started, she said.

Fedorchuk also clarified that no Mosaic employees had to use or gather at refuge stations at its mines during Thursday’s quake.

She said employees did have to muster to do a head-count during a power outage that accompanied the tremor. That procedure happened at all three mines with 120 total employees.

Petrachek said his power was out for about 1 1/2 hours Thursday night. On Friday, the quake had people in the area talking.

“There’s always conspiracy theories: ‘Oh, the mine and the ground is going to collapse underneath us.’ You know how some people get with it,” Petrachek said.

“But I don’t think there’s panicking or people moving out of the area or anything like that.”

He couldn’t feel the tremors from Thursday’s quake, but they have reached his home in the past.

“We’d get something like a stack of boxes would fall over, and you’d kind of look at it, and wonder what happened, and then you’d hear there was a tremor,” he said.

“They can extend out a few miles from Esterhazy. It’s not limited right to the town area.”