The ground was shaking Wednesday night in central Pennsylvania.

A 3.4 magnitude earthquake hit near the community of Honey Grove around 8:30 p.m.

“The coffee cups, of course rattled and it was just shifted like this, just a tad,” Courtney Beiler said.

Beiler was at home, just north of Mifflintown, Wednesday night when she felt a big rumble and all of a sudden, dishes in her kitchen started rattling.

“My husband was sitting on the chair, and he said my eyes were as big as saucers and his eyes were pretty big too, and we were like, ‘What just happened?'” Beiler said.

What happened was an earthquake shaking her whole house.

“It happened right in the middle of the valley and ridge, and so because the rocks here are so folded and cracked, there are a lot of these faults, these breaks in the rocks,” Harrisburg University earth system sciences assistant professor Dr. Michael Meyer said.

Meyer says it’s not surprising that the 3.4 magnitude quake was felt by so many.

“Definitely in the tens of kilometers deep, so it has a lot of very solid rock to travel through and so the more connected and sort of cold and hard the rock is, it can travel greater distances,” Dr. Meyer said.

But even near the epicenter in Honey Grove, many didn’t feel a thing.

“I didn’t feel much but all I heard was a big boom,” Dylan Bell said.

Meyer says we’re in a mild region.

“But we do have lots of old faults, very old faults and so sometimes those old faults, since they’re a point of weakness, they move, and they make an earthquake,” Dr. Meyer said.

Hundreds reported rumbles from Juniata County south to the Maryland line west of Harrisburg. The strongest recorded earthquake in the region was a 4.1 magnitude quake that hit Lancaster County in 1984.

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