For many in Young County, the house was a rockin' Saturday night.

Oklahoma's biggest earthquake in history, a 5.6 magnitude quake occurred late Saturday and originated near Sparks, Okla. east of Oklahoma City, more than 200 miles from Graham.

"The important thing to understand is that if you take the same magnitude earthquake and you put one here and one in California, it will be felt over a much larger area than the same magnitude in California," said Gary Patterson, geologist and director of education and outreach for the U.S. Center for Earthquake Research and Information.

He said because the geology of the central United States is different - the Earth's crust is harder, colder and denser than in California, the energy travels efficiently, like running a jack hammer on a concrete slab. "If you had a continuous slab, you'd feel it in your feet a greater distance away," Patterson said. He said 95 to 98 percent of the earthquakes in the world happen in places like California.

"When we have an earthquake in the stable continental interior, we're learning new things," Patterson said. "The plates should be rigid. You should only really have big earthquakes at the boundaries between them." Randy Keller, director of Oklahoma Geological Survey, said the fault that affects Oklahoma is the Wilzetta Fault which runs northeast to southwest.

"It's deep down in the Earth several miles, and it looks like the earthquakes are following that fault zone," Keller said. "The motion that caused the earthquake is parallel to that fault. It looks like we have a good case for what fault moved and what direction it moved."

He said earthquakes in Oklahoma are nothing new.

"Oklahoma has been recognized for decades as somewhere that has quite a few earthquakes compared to nearby states," Keller said. He said there has been an increase in detected earthquakes because there are more seismographs in the area added in recent years from the EarthScope program of the National Science Foundation.

"There's been an increase in earthquakes big enough that people have felt them, but how big that increase is, is subject to a couple of different things. If you have lots of sensors around, you're going to sense lots of earthquakes," Keller said. "And of course people are earthquake sensors, too. ... People are more sensitive because they can feel earthquakes that are smaller now. But there's definitely some increase in activity." Rick Edwards was at his home on Loving Highway watching television when he felt the earthquake shortly before 11 p.m.

"The chair I was sitting in started shaking, and all the weapons hanging on the gun case started flopping around and I thought it was my horses, that they were up on the deck shaking the house," Edwards said. "I went up to the door to run them off, but there were no horses on the deck.

"That's when I looked on Facebook and realized we had been through an earthquake." Patty Pardue was also at her home when the quake hit Young County. "My windows in my house shook, and my back porch shook up and down and it lasted about a minute and a half, two at the most and that was about it," Pardue said. "We didn't even know about it until the next day."

Jan Peterman was at her home on Eastside Lake Road when she felt the shaking. "It was a wobbling. It wasn't jerky or anything, and the furniture made noises like it was moving back and forth, too," Peterman said. "I was in the computer room and the dog was sleeping, and we both looked at each other cause it woke him up." She said although she felt the quake, there was no damage to her home.

"It was real odd," said Peterman. "We've never had that experience, so we knew it wasn't weather related. I'd rather have that than a tornado."

Gary Tull was spending the evening outside of Wichita Falls at Coyote Resort. "They have hunting type, little kitchenette cabins on cinder blocks, and we were sitting there 10:50 or 10:55," Tull explained. "We heard a roar and the cabin shook, and I thought somebody hit our cabin and my wife said, 'It's not stopping.' We were watching Channel 6 news, and the newscaster paused when it hit. The ceiling fans began to shake. I said, 'Well nobody hit our cabin' and that's when the newscaster said she thought we were in an earthquake.

"It was weird, it was really different. Everything moves, you realize it's not just the cabin 'cause you step out and everything's shaking."

Keller said he doesn't expect Graham residents to experience another earthquake like the one Saturday evening any time soon. "I don't think there will be more of greater intensity," he said. "You've had a significant stress release by this second earthquake (a 4.2 earthquake happened Saturday morning). The odds are that's the end of that, and some other place will build up pressure and cause an earthquake somewhere else, possibly several states away.

"The planet is under stress from plate tectonics and it builds up to a level and there's some flaw in the Earth's crust like a fault where it's released. But it will be hundreds of years before it builds back up and some other place will break."