Whidbey residents were in for a rude awakening early Monday morning.

The work week started off with what some on social media described as a rumbling, or shifting of earth, as a 4.5 magnitude earthquake rattled the Puget Sound region at 5:02 a.m. on March 3.

People across Whidbey, from Oak Harbor to Freeland, reported feeling the shaking from their beds. The quake struck not far from Orcas Island, with a depth of about 10 miles, smack in the middle of the North American plate, Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Director Harold Tobin said. It’s a site where there hasn’t been much of a record of other earthquakes occurring over the past few decades.

“At 4.5, that’s pretty perceptible,” he said. “That doesn’t mean every single person will wake up.”

As far as he knows, there were no injuries or damages to property. Many with the MyShake app received notifications about the earthquake. Tobin said the statewide alert system, which provides Amber Alerts and other emergency notifications, will send out an alert only when an earthquake reaches the 5.0 threshold.

Several thousands of quakes are detected every year on Pacific Northwest Seismic Network instruments. But with the Trump Administration’s recent layoffs of NOAA employees, seismic monitoring may be at risk.

While a medium-sized quake like Monday’s is not necessarily a harbinger of something much bigger, it’s not a bad idea to be prepared. Tobin recommended checking your earthquake kit to make sure food hasn’t expired and batteries in flashlights still work. It’s also a good opportunity to take other safety precautions, such as securely bolting bookshelves to the walls.

“It’s a reminder that these things happen and we live in a seismically active area and we should always be ready, even if we don’t know when it’s gonna come,” he said.

Or as one online commenter said, it’s the reality of living in Washington, and it shouldn’t be surprising.