Employee Talia Pershall, 16, puts syrup back on a shelf while cleaning up at White's Foodliner grocery store Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016 in Pawnee, Okla., following a 5.6 magnitude earthquake that hit just after 7 a.m., in north-central Oklahoma. (David Bitton/The News Press via AP)

For many Douglas County residents, the start of Labor Day weekend was marked with confusion (and perhaps a little anxiety) as a 5.6 magnitude earthquake centered near Stillwater, Okla. swept through Kansas and north to Nebraska early Friday morning.

The record-tying quake, which originated in north-central Oklahoma around 7 a.m. Saturday, could felt be felt as far away as Dallas, northwestern Arkansas and Des Moines, Iowa. In Lawrence and the surrounding area, it was a literal wake-up call for some residents, who reported feeling their beds shaking beneath them.

But Michael Taylor, an associate professor of geology at the University of Kansas, said he wasn’t surprised to hear reports of the record-tying quake reaching the northeastern corner of the state.

“The frequency of moderate to strong earthquakes is increasing moderately to exponentially, especially in the last 10 years or so,” Taylor said, referring to Oklahoma earthquakes felt in Kansas.

It’s a phenomenon that has especially grown in frequency since 2009, he points out. Another 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck Oklahoma in 2011, and a comparable quake of 5.1 occurred, also in Oklahoma, in February of this year. Taylor remembers feeling at least one of those in Lawrence.

Additionally, Kansas and Oklahoma have seen close to 80 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or higher within the last decade, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

On Saturday, shortly after the 5.6 magnitude earthquake shook homes and businesses near the small town — and approximate quake center — of Pawnee, Okla., officials began the process of shutting down 37 of the state’s 3,200 active disposal wells.

Many scientists, Taylor among them, point to the high-pressure injection of wastewater from oil and gas wells as an underlying cause to Oklahoma’s earthquakes, of which there have been more than 400 reported in 2016 alone. Thousands more have hit the state in recent years.

Scientific studies have linked the majority of this increased activity to wastewater injection, the idea being that wastewater, as it migrates into rock formations, alters stresses along old faults, in turn causing these faults to slip.

Investigations will continue this week to determine the cause of the quake, which local officials in Oklahoma said resulted in moderate to severe damage and at least one nonlife-threatening injury.

But in Lawrence, “Some people didn’t even feel it, so the likelihood of it doing foundation damage is really, really low,” said Taylor. He explained that those lying down (particularly those who might consider themselves “light sleepers”) at the time of the earthquake were most likely to feel its movements. Folks walking around outside, not so much.

Shelby Bean, a personal lines account manager at Lawrence’s CEK Insurance, was already up that morning, supervising a garage sale at her home. Though she didn’t feel the earthquake, Bean said she knew to expect inquiries about the quake — and the coverage options available to her customers in case of such emergencies – the morning she returned to work after the Labor Day weekend.

“I figured we’d have a couple calls, people asking about it,” Bean said, noting that, as of Tuesday afternoon, she’d only received one.

In Kansas, earthquake coverage isn’t included in a standard homeowners insurance policy. That kind of coverage, according to Kansas Insurance Department communications director Bob Hanson, requires an endorsement to the existing homeowners policy or a separate policy altogether.

The cost varies, he and Bean agree. A house valued at $200,000 to $300,000, for instance, might set the homeowner back about $50 per year in earthquake coverage, Bean said. It’s not terribly expensive, but the deductible can be high, she added.

About 5 percent of her agency’s customers have earthquake coverage. That’s probably roughly in line with the rest of the state, Bean estimates. According to statistics released earlier this year by the Insurance Information Institute, earthquake coverage totaled around $6.5 million dollars across the state of Kansas in 2014. To compare, California had the largest amount of earthquake premiums in 2014, totaling $1.7 billion.

“That ranks us 34th in the country,” Hanson said. “Honestly, 6 and a half million dollars’ worth of coverage spread out over all the homeowners in Kansas….that’s not a lot.”

Even with the increase in Oklahoma earthquakes over the last few years, Bean said she hasn’t seen much of an uptick in earthquake coverage, at least not at her agency. She’s been there 27 years now, and is still surprised whenever she sees an earthquake policy land on her desk.

“I don’t carry it on my house,” Bean said.

Still, scientists like Taylor are confident we’ll continue to experience more Oklahoma-centered earthquakes in Kansas.

“I would say that the old geology adage is, ‘If it happened in the past, it’ll probably happen in the future,'” Taylor said. “I expect that we will see other moderate to strong earthquakes. The question is when — and that is really hard to determine.”