LEWISTON — Tremors from a 5.9 earthquake centered in Virginia shortly before 2 p.m. were felt throughout the eastern seaboard Tuesday, including reports from throughout Lewiston-Auburn and as far north as Augusta.

Reports of tremors were called in from Sabattus Street, Main Street and Lincoln Street in Lewiston, Spring Street in Auburn, and the towns of Lisbon and Livermore Falls. One person in Livermore Falls reported that the tremors shook the building for 15 to 20 seconds.

Lewiston police responded at 2:20 p.m. to check the basement in a public housing complex on River Road where tremors were felt.

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed the quake at 1:53 p.m. centered in central Virginia.

Mike Foley, senior geologist with the Maine Geological Survey, said his office was receiving earthquake reports from southern Maine through Augusta.

Foley said earthquakes are measured at their source by the Richter scale. However, away from the source they are measured under the 1-12 Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale.

About an hour after Tuesday’s quake, Foley said the MGS was pegging this quake as a 3 on the Mercalli scale. Maine has felt at least six quakes of at least 3.7 since 1979.

He received one report of a woman seeing street lights swaying gently in Portland.

Skip Foley of Oxford was having coffee at Denny’s in Auburn when he said he noticed the counter shaking a little bit about the same time calls to local police started rolling in about shaking buildings and other signs of an earthquake.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was 3.7 miles deep. Shaking was felt at the White House and all over the East Coast, as far south as Chapel Hill, N.C. Parts of the Pentagon, White House and Capitol were evacuated. The quake was centered in Mineral, Va., in Louisa County.

Foley said it wasn’t much of a shake. “Probably just enough to stir the sugar in my coffee a little bit,” he said.

On Turner Street in Auburn, 22-year-old Morgan Sewell said the tremors “broke a wine glass on my wine rack. I looked out the window and could see the puddles outside shifting. I really thought I was crazy until I stood up and then I really could feel it.”

Sewell has family living in South Carolina who reported feeling tremors there about 20 minutes after she felt the movement in Auburn.

“It was definitely weird. Kind of scary,” Sewell said.

When staff at the River Street Head Start school in Lewiston felt their building shaking, they decided to move the students from an on-site playground where they had been playing to a nearby park, said Androscoggin County Head Start executive director Estelle Rubinstein.

Thinking the shaking could have been caused by a ruptured gas line or other emergency, they called the police and fire departments to check the building. “You have to err on the side of caution,” she said. “We moved the children as far away as possible, not knowing what it was.”

There was no damage to the building, and the center’s teachers were able to turn the event into “a teachable moment,” Rubinstein said, as they talked to the children about earthquakes and what causes them.

Quake-related news from the Associated Press

No threat of tsunami from East Coast quake