Do you remember Lexington’s 1980 earthquake? ‘It scared me spitless’

Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history — some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.

For about 35 seconds on a summer afternoon in 1980, Lexington was hit by the strongest recorded earthquake in Kentucky’s history.

It was around 3 p.m. on July 27 when an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale hit the Lexington area. Some remember it as feeling like a giant worm burrowing under the ground. Others said it felt like riding in an old school bus.

“It scared me spitless,” Judy Tipton, a Fayette County School Board member told the Herald-Leader at the time. “I heard the dishes rattling, and I saw everybody running outside… It was terrifying.”

The quake’s epicenter was near Mount Olivet, in Roberson County. While there were no injuries, according to the University of Kentucky Geological Survey, the quake caused about $3 million in damage in Maysville. It shattered windows, toppled chimneys and shook houses off of their foundation locally.

The quake was felt across 15 states, seismologists said, as far north as Canada and as far south as Alabama.

Ronald Street, a UK Seismologist, told the Herald-Leader at the time earthquakes were highly unusual in this part of the country.

“I consider it to be very rare,” he said. “It’s going to be a well-documented quake, and I think you’re going to see a lot of new and revised information coming out as we study what happened.”

It’s not the first, or the last, strong earthquake to hit the area.

The Richter scale is used to measure the strength of an earthquake and gives it a strength rating from 1 to 10, 10 being the strongest.

In 2012, the magnitude 4.2 Perry County earthquake caused minor damage to the Letcher County Courthouse in southeastern Kentucky. And more recently, in December 2024, residents in northeastern Kentucky felt some rumbling when a 3.3 magnitude earthquake hit West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.

Officials said the quake’s epicenter was about two miles north of Chesapeake, Ohio, and was felt as far west as Morehead.

“We have seen about five earthquakes of this size in history actually in this region, within 30 miles of the epicenter. And that means that they happen, but they are not that frequent,” UK seismologist Seth Carpenter told WKYT last year. “This is not an area where we consider it to be highly active.”

Earthquakes in Kentucky sometimes stem from the Eastern Tennessee Seismic zone that is usually felt in southeastern Kentucky. They can also be centralized in the western part of the state along the New Madrid Fault Zone.

Measuring earthquakes on the magnitude scale using data from nearby seismograph stations was developed by Charles Richter in the 1930s, creating the Richter scale used today. Earthquakes recorded prior to then are estimated in strength.

Three earthquakes recorded before the Richter scale are estimated to have been even larger than the 1980 quake that shook Lexington.

Between December 1811 to February 1812, three large earthquakes estimated to have been greater than a magnitude 7, occurred. Those earthquakes affected the whole state, and were so powerful that they caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards and changed the course of the river in some areas.

In Lexington, the earthquakes damaged Ashland, the estate of Henry Clay, and John James Audubon wrote that he was riding his horse in the barrens region of the state when he heard a distant rumbling. In “Ornithological Biography,” he wrote that his horse began taking careful steps and then stopped short.

“All the shrubs and trees began to move from their very roots, the ground rose and fell in successive furrows, like the ruffled waters of a lake,” he wrote.

Could an earthquake of that magnitude hit the area again?

Jim Wilkinson, director of the Central U.S. Earthquake Consortium, told KET’s Kentucky Life the New Madrid zone averages 150-200 quakes every year, but most of them aren’t felt.

However, earthquakes on the scale of the 1811 one have happened before, and there’s a 7 to 10% chance it could happen again. But smaller magnitude quakes — between 6 and 6.5 on the Richter scale — are a little more likely. Wilkinson said there was a 25 to 45% chance in a 50-year window that a quake like that could happen here

Research geophysicist Oliver Boyd with the U.S. Geological Survey told KET if that strong of an earthquake were to hit today, it would be three times as devastating as Hurricane Katrina, causing more than $300 billion in damage.