From McDonald ...
"We were sitting there and all of a sudden it sounded like something exploded," explains resident Ally Jones.
To Girard ...
"The floor kind of dropped and then everything rumbled," adds resident Thomas Borocz.
And other communities across the Valley, our viewers felt the impact of a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that hit at 3:04 Saturday afternoon.
"Basically most of it was just a lot of residents scared," says McDonald Fire Chief Nicholas Kish. "We had pictures and knick-knacks off of walls and some things moved in the house. We did have a chimney that came off, a brick chimney off of a home in the village from the initial earthquake, that came down in the yard."
This quake marks the 11th in the Valley this year, all of them within two miles of the D&L Energy brine fluid injection well in Youngstown Township, that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources encouraged the company to shut down on Friday.
After experts originally reported the earthquake epicenter to be in McDonald, a few hours later the location changed to within a tenth of a mile of the same well site.
"I mean I'm pro-business, but I don't know about this, I'm a little concerned," says Borocz.
There's no real evidence linking this year's seismic activity to the injection well.
O.D.N.R. officials say the shut-down is a precautionary measure.
Bbut if these earthquakes continue happening, local emergency personnel want to be prepared.
"It's somewhat a different type of situation now that the fire department needs to look at and has to begin to deal with from what we're used to," Chief Kish says.
Damage could be seen on the outside of some homes; one Girard homeowner took us inside to see her now cracked walls.
Some say their houses were spared.
"It's an older home, but I was able to go in the basement and look around and check the blocks to see if there were any cracks or anything, and so far haven't noticed anything yet," Cosmo Signoriello of Girard told us.
Before March, there'd never been a locally originated earthquake in the Youngstown area.
"I've never felt an earthquake before and it was just an experience!" says Jones.
