THUNDER BAY — Residents of a rural Thunder Bay mobile home court were shaken by a loud bang and tremor that rattled the entire trailer park Monday morning.
"All my tenants came running out in their bathrobes," Walter Marchese told TBNewswatch.
Marchese owns the Silver Springs Estates trailer park off North Branch Road in Gorham Township.
He said he felt "a horrible vibration" that shook his 1500-square-foot house just before 9:00 a.m.
"It was a huge bang and a tremendous earth tremor. My whole trailer park shook and everybody got rustled out of bed."
Marchese wondered if a meteorite had fallen nearby.
"It hit with such a force that it shook the whole ground...It had to be something massive," Marchese said.
However, it turned out that the source was blasting in a Biloski Brothers quarry.
Silver Springs resident Jennifer Hoard said the quarry is about five kilometres away.
She described "a huge boom that shook our entire mobile home, the windows and everything"
Hoard said the blast was felt through the whole park.
"My husband said the cats in the neighbourhood scattered, and the birds and everything."
She said she was worried initially about her son.
"It literally felt like somebody had hit the front of our trailer, and all the way through the trailer. My son's in the front, so I went to ask if he was OK.," Hoard said. "And then I went running outside, and all my neighbours were out there too."
A spokesperson for Biloski Brothers told TBNewswatch "everything went normal" with Monday's blast, and that he's unsure why its effects were felt so severely in the trailer park.
He said it was only the second blast the company has conducted in the quarry in about three years, but additional blasting is planned.
Monitoring equipment operated in the Thunder Bay area by Natural Resources Canada detected an incident at 8:56 a.m.
Seismologist Stephen Halchuk described it as a "very small" signal, with the kind of signature that generally indicates a man-made source.
