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The decision by thousands of workers to flee their buildings when a 5.0 magnitude earthquake struck Quebec on Wednesday put them in more danger than if they had found a safe place inside, according to a disaster expert.

The tremor hit at 1:41 p.m. ET south of Echo Lake, Que., 60 kilometres north of Ottawa near the Ontario border and was felt across southern and eastern Ontario and western Quebec, as well as in some U.S. states.

The quake caused the acting mayor of Gracefield, Que., a small town about 50 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre, to ask for emergency assistance after a number of buildings were damaged.

In Ottawa and Gatineau, the quake sent thousands of workers streaming out of office towers and onto the streets, where they awaited word as to whether it was safe to return.

But Prof. Paul Kovacs of the University of Western Ontario said the city workers did the wrong thing.

“Parts of the outside of the building are the most likely to fall and hit you,” said Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.

“If you move inside of a building or outside of a building during an earthquake that is one of the most dangerous things to do,” Kovacs said.

Images from the past year of Haiti and Chile, where buildings collapsed after more powerful quakes struck, might have led many people to flee. But Kovacs said while people should leave a building if they feel it is poorly constructed or unsafe, most of Ottawa’s buildings are designed to handle quakes.

Janet Drysdale, a seismologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, said if people do leave a building, they should also move a safe distance away, which many people did not do on Wednesday in Ottawa’s downtown core.

Both Kovacs and Drysdale said the safe thing to do in a secure building is get under a secure desk, cover your head to protect it and wait for the quake to end.

Schools in Ottawa’s two biggest school boards and all but one federal building in the National Capital Region were open Thursday morning after passing inspections in the aftermath of Wednesday’s earthquake.

Structural engineers inspected 19 schools with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, and similar checks were also made at the Ottawa Catholic School Board.

All schools were deemed safe.

Public Works has reopened every federal building in the National Capital Region except for Place du Portage’s Phase 3 building, which is still undergoing structural inspections.

But Thursday is Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, a provincial holiday in Quebec, so few employees are expected to need to go into the building.

The impact of the quake was felt more north of Ottawa, particularly in Gracefield. Seven buildings — including the town’s 98-year-old church — were damaged, town officials said.

“Right now we have the church that has been affected very badly,” said the acting mayor of Gracefield, Claude Blais, adding that the church was a popular tourist attraction in the town.

A section of Highway 307 near Bowman, Que., north of Ottawa, collapsed into a river as a result of the quake, shutting down that route.

In Montreal, some people felt the rumble — but some didn’t even realize the city had been hit by an earthquake. The tremors, which lasted about 30 seconds, rattled buildings in Toronto and Ottawa, as well as government offices across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Que.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the two largest quakes in western Quebec occurred in 1935 at magnitude 6.1 and in 1732 at magnitude 6.2. The latter caused significant damage in Montreal.

The agency said earthquakes cause significant damage in the region about once a decade. Smaller earthquakes are felt three or four times a year.

BY CBCNews

A cleanup crew surveys the damage to a church in Gracefield, Que., after the earthquake Wednesday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press).