The Richter scale is a shitty way to judge what people actually experience. The key factor is the depth, which I rarely see reported in the news. You can have a relatively low magnitude quake near the surface that causes a lot of shaking or a high magnitude quake quite deep that doesn’t. This one was VERY shallow (1.8mi deep) which explains why such a low magnitude quake felt so strong to those folks.

Here in Japan we use the Shindo scale which measures intensity at the surface. I really wish the rest of the world would adopt it because it makes it very simple for people to comprehend just how bad a quake was in a particular area.

To put things in perspective, we experience M3+ quakes on a very frequent basis without feeling anything at the surface.