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Sandy rattled Northwest

SALT LAKE CITY — Hurricane Sandy didn’t just hammer the East Coast — it jiggled the ground across the country ever so slightly, scientists said yesterday.

Earthquake sensors located as far away as the Pacific Northwest detected the storm’s energy as it surged toward the New York metropolitan region last year. The network typically records the sudden release of energy in the Earth’s crust, but it can pick up shaking triggered by ocean waves, mine cave-ins and tornadoes.

As Sandy lashed at the Big Apple and New Jersey, the force of waves shook the seafloor, which was recorded by the system of 500 sensors.

The energy generated by Sandy was similar to small earthquakes between magnitudes 2 and 3, seismologists at the University of Utah estimated.

While they did not track Sandy’s strength last October, they went back and analyzed seismic data before and after the storm churned ashore.

The findings were presented at a meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Salt Lake City.

Sandy wasn’t the first storm to be sensed by quake stations. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, instruments in California tracked the path of the punishing waves.