First ice storms, now an EARTHQUAKE: America's Southeast struck by Valentine's Day tremblor felt across three states

• The 4.1-magnitude earthquake was centered near Edgefield, South Carolina
• It was also felt across Georgia and North Carolina
• There were no reports of any major damage

By Ryan Gorman

Published: 23:19 EDT, 14 February 2014 | Updated: 00:32 EDT, 15 February 2014

Snow and ice weary southerners received another jolt Friday night when an earthquake struck the region.

The 4.1-magnitude quake was centered in Edgefield, South Carolina, but was also felt in North Carolina and Georgia - it occurred at 10.23p and lasted about 10 seconds, according to witnesses.

The Valentine’s Day evening quake startled many people and is just the latest in a series of freak weather events to strike the region.

Southern quake: The 4.1-magnitude earthquake was near Edgefield, South Carolina, but felt in both Georgia and North Carolina

The Valentine’s Day evening quake startled many people and is just the latest in a series of freak weather events to strike the region.

Initially ruled a 4.4 on the Richter scale, the 4.1 quake was felt over a wide region – including in ice-ravaged Atlanta – because it was at a shallow depth of about 3 miles.

Though minor in scope, USGS Geophysicist Dale Grant called the event a ‘large quake for that area.’

Despite being large for the area, 4.1-magnitude quakes do not often cause significant damage. It did knock out land line phones in at least one area of Edgefield, a local told Fox Carolina.

Other locals said their homes shook enough to wake them, things came off shelves and that it felt like a train was running by - but one person compared it to a plane crash.

'Thought a plane was crashing into my house,' Micki Sorrow wrote on Facebook. 'Loud roar entire house shook. I was looking out Windows for flames.'

Johnnie Melissa wrote that her ceiling has damage and that the foundation shifted during the quake.

‘It was a sudden jolt, very quick,' Danny Turner told Fox Carolina. 'I thought it was snow rolling off the roof, it shook the windows.’

Just thawing out: The south was hit with two vicious ice storms, as shown in this picture from Wednesday of a suburban Atlanta highway, in the weeks leading up to the earthquake

Early reports that a hospital in Edgefield had a crack in the floor and was preparing to evacuate were refuted by authorities within an hour of the shaking.

Michelle's Pizza, in McCormick, South Carolina, suffered broken glasses in the quake, according to WJBF, but that appeared to be the worst of the known damage as of about midnight.

It sounded almost like an explosion,' Alva Lewis told The State. 'I thought it was a truck collision. I said nobody could have survived that. It lasted about 10 to 15 seconds. I never felt anything like that before.'

A Spartanburg County Office of Emergency Management spokesperson told WSPA that quakes are not uncommon for the region, but they are not often felt.

'Most people don’t realize how many earthquakes we experience in South Carolina – we actually had 13 across the state in 2013,' he told the station.

'We felt the floor shaking and were like ‘what’s going on?’ A Simpsonville resident told Fox Carolina. 'The floor, everything in the house was shaking… like someone was running around.

‘The thought of an earthquake never came to my mind.’

In the dark: Power was knocked out to hundreds of thousands of people during the ice storms, especially in hard hit Calhoun County, South Carolina (pictured)

The unusual tremblor shook the region after a four week span that saw two crippling ice storms that cut power to hundreds of thousands and led to massive traffic delays and pileups.

The South normally does not receive sizable earthquakes or snow storms, but this has not been an average winter.

An ice storm last month sent Atlanta into a tailspin - roads were closed, children stuck in schools for hours and a full-blown crisis for Georgia Governor Nathan Dean over his handling of the weather.

The region was finally beginning to thaw out when another major storm slammed the entire east coast from Tuesday to Friday. The northeast mostly saw snow, but the southeast once again saw significant icing.

This has been a long, hard winter for most of the country, an earthquake was the last thing many likely expected.

The shaking occurred along the Georgia rift line, a minor fault line running from Georgia to South Carolina.

The largest quake in the area (magnitude 5.1) occurred in 1916, according to the USGS.