DUANE SHERRILL
Contributor
Some folks may have been shaken awake Saturday morning in the Marion area after a magnitude 4.1 earthquake occurred near Greenback just south of Knoxville shortly after 8 a.m.
While no damage was reported in area, the quake, which had its epicenter 30 miles southwest of Knoxville, was the talk of many in the Mid-South as the trimmers could be felt as far away as Nashville and Atlanta. The fact it was felt so far from its epicenter was because it was a shallow quake, only about 15 miles deep. As far as earthquakes, there have been 22 recorded in Tennessee in the past month but the Greenback quake was by far the biggest.
Although east Tennessee is not a place people may think about when it comes to earthquakes, faults in the East Tennessee Seismic Zone as well as the New Madrid fault just outside West Tennessee tend to be somewhat active. However, the Greenback quake is only the fourth such 4.0+ quake in east Tennessee since 1900. The 4.1 quake Saturday does rank up there as the biggest on the fault since 1900 was the Alcoa quake of 1973 that saw a 4.7 magnitude event. The last quake on the fault was a 4.4 magnitude in 2018 which its epicenter near Decatur.
As far as impacts in the area surrounding the epicenter, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park did close Foothills Parkway West in the new construction to have its inspected. There were also precautionary inspections of nearby dams.
