Toronto has been shaken many times this week.

It made Friday’s actual earthquake seem too much to be true. But it is, confirms Earthquakes Canada which found that at 9:43 a.m., a minor quake — 5.2 magnitude on the Richter scale — rippled out from the Quebec side of the Ottawa Valley.

Computer monitors, coffee cups and chandeliers in Toronto, Waterloo, Sudbury, New York, and parts of Michigan and Ohio quivered.

Ten minutes later came a 4.1-magnitude aftershock.

No injuries or damage — apart from a few broken picture frames and the like — have been reported.

“We don’t expect to see major damage from an earthquake until it gets to around a 5.5,” says Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Still, Mayor Albert Armstrong of Shawville, Que., a town 18 kilometres southwest of the epicentre, says he has never felt anything like it in his whole life.

“I thought a large truck had crashed into the side of the building,” he said. The three-storey-high brick walls of City Hall were trembling and the window panes rattling.

The rumbling sounded “like something breaking the sound barrier,” he said.

Earthquake Canada seismologist John Adams expects tens to hundreds of smaller tremors to follow the earthquake, mostly close to the epicentre.

It’s not unusual for an earthquake to be felt this widely in Eastern North America, says Paul Caruso. “It’s because the rocks underground are very hard and continuous, they transmit the energy very well.”

In Toronto, the tremors were missed by many — like Alycia Suriyakumar who took the decorative masks dancing on her bedroom wall to be a vivid nightmare.

But Risë Lawrence, an office administrator at Hillcrest Community School certainly noticed.

“A bin that was filled with crayons, crashed to the floor,” she says. “I thought it was a ghost.”

Norma Meneguzzi Spall heard a low rumbling as she snapped photos of the robin family outside her home office window.

She only noticed something was amiss when the mama robin paused from feeding her three chicks to peer around the corner. The bird remained frozen for good minute and a half, says Spall.

“She was sort of trying to assess the situation.”

For Nicole Hunnersen in Barrie, the quake will be remembered as an unsettling stand-in for her alarm.

“I woke up to my bed swaying. It made my whole body move. I woke up thinking that someone had entered my room and for some reason was moving my bed,” she told the Star. “I was home alone. It was definitely an unnerving experience.”

It’s unlikely to happen again soon. “For Ottawa to be shaken twice in about three years is a little unusual,” said Adams, who says such earthquakes happen in Western Quebec about once every 10 years.

It seems that tremors in Toronto tend to coalesce around big news events.

The last quake felt here was a 5.0 on Jun. 23, 2010, just days before the G20 summit. Before that was a 5.4 on Sept. 25, 1998, the same day Nelson Mandela launched the Canadian branch of his children’s fund before 46,000 students in the SkyDome.

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Correction - May 27, 2013: This article was edited from a previous version that misstaated the name of Hillcrest Community School.

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