WALLOWA COUNTY — Gay Behnke was up reading late Monday evening, Jan. 4, when she heard what she first thought was a sonic boom.

“I just happened to be up, about 11:30 at night, (and heard) this loud boom, and I mean a boom,” she said. “I have since learned that that does accompany an earthquake. I did not realize that.”

Her home on Tamarack Road about seven miles south of Lostine, started shaking shortly after.

“I have a real old antique lamp, and it started swaying,” she said.

Behnke and her neighbors — two others of whom were awake at the time and six others who were awakened, had felt the shaking from a small earthquake — a magnitude 2.4 tremor on the Richter scale. The quake shook about 9.3 miles southwest of Lostine — and just under seven miles west of Behnke and her neighbors — at 11:30 p.m., according to data on the United States Geological Survey website.

It’s not the first time Behnke has been in an earthquake.

“I was over in the Willamette Valley when the big earthquake hit and did damage in Sublimity,” she said, referring to a 5.6 magnitude quake east of Salem in 1993.

This quake, though, had an element she hadn’t heard in Sublimity — the loud boom.

“I was thinking sonic boom, meteor. But I also (thought) it was an earthquake,” she said. “This was new to me. I have been in earthquakes.”

She noted a couple differences between the two quakes.

“First, there was no boom to get my attention,” she said of the Sublimity shake. “The ground just started rolling. My house did shake, and it was early in the morning.”

The quake early this month was actually one of two that hit in the same region that night. A second quake was recorded early Tuesday morning, Jan. 5, at 1:24 a.m. The quake was smaller at magnitude 1.7, but was about 1.9 miles closer to Lostine.

The first quake that night typically would not be felt, but it was relatively shallow at just over a mile deep. The second quake, which was not felt, was registered at a depth of 6.2 miles.

The earthquakes were the third and fourth in Wallowa County reported by the USGS in less than a month timespan — all of them in the same region. A magnitude 2.2 quake was reported at 4:31 a.m. on Dec. 18 — though about 7 miles deep — and a week earlier, on Dec. 11, a quake of 1.5 magnitude just after 5 a.m. hit at a depth of 6.9 miles.

Behnke, a retired educator, said she didn’t expect to be feeling any quakes — even small ones — after moving to rural Wallowa County.

“I just thought I was done with earthquakes,” she said.