FRANKLIN, N.C. (AP) - A small earthquake shook buildings and rattled dishes in at least four western North Carolina counties Thursday night, the seventh noticeable temblor to shake the region in the past year. There were no reports of damage in the 3.1-magnitude quake, centered 28 miles north of Franklin and felt from Maggie Valley to Bryson City to Cashiers just before 9 p.m.
The quake was considered minor, said Dale Grant, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center.
"A quake of this magnitude generally won't cause a great deal of damage, if any," he said.
Still, emergency dispatchers took a flood of worried calls from people asking if they had heard an explosion or plane crash.
"Oh Lord, after it happened every line in here lit up," Jackson County dispatcher Belinda Clawson said.
Arthur Buchanan said he didn't hear anything while working inside P.J.'s Fast Food Mart in Sylva, but he felt the store tremble.
"I figured somebody had ran into the side of my building," he said, "because it shook it good."
Over the past year, four of six other noticeable quakes within 60 miles of Thursday's epicenter were bigger, according to the center. They include a 3.7-magnitude temblor in August centered in Madison County that shook houses as far south as Athens, Ga.
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Information from: The Asheville Citizen-Times, http://www.citizen- times.com
