NEWRY – Ed and Loretta Powers were sipping coffee at their kitchen table at about 5:30 on Thursday morning when they heard a loud explosion.

They jumped from their chairs and each looked out a different window. Ed thought their wood stove had blown up; Loretta looked to the sky for falling debris.

“It got us out of the chairs real quick,” Newry Administrator Loretta Powers said Thursday afternoon at the town office.

What the Powers and others from Hanover to Newry heard and felt was a minor earthquake that hit at 5:26 a.m., about 6 miles west of Rumford Center, according to a report from the Maine and U.S. geological surveys.

There were no immediate reports of damage from the quake that measured 2.2 on the Richter scale, which measures the magnitude of an earthquake based on seismogram records.

The quake’s epicenter appeared to be in Newry’s Plumbago Mountain area north of Hanover’s Howard Pond, based on enlarged maps of the site. Its depth was 8.7 miles, according to the New England Seismic Network in Boston.

The Powers live near Bear River, a few miles west of the epicenter.

“It was rumbling and then there was a bad explosion. It was weird. My son said it shook his bed,” Powers said.

“It sounded like someone had blasted at Mount Will. All I heard was a huge blast,” Newry Deputy Clerk Anita Clark said inside the town office on Thursday afternoon.

Clark, who lives farther west along Sunday River, said the quake rattled plates on walls inside her home.

“Some people who called us said they thought it was a plane crash, some thought their roof had caved in or their woodpile fell over,” Clark said. “I looked around at my neighbors’ houses because I thought it was a propane tank explosion.”

Closer to the epicenter, Plumbago Mountain landowner Bob Brown of Hanover said the noise rattled his black Labrador retriever, but all he heard was a loud thump.

“It sounded just like somebody dropped 1,000 pounds on top of the house,” he said. “I was eating my oatmeal and the dog came flying from the bed to the door in one bound and ran out the dog door. He was all shook up. He ran around the house a couple of times barking.”

Brown’s brother, Stanley Brown, who lives nearby, said the quake startled him.

“It was just a big thump,” he said. “It shook my house and the house creeped a little. I felt it as much as I heard it.”

Surprisingly, no one called 911 to report the noise to state or county police, dispatchers said.