Some residents of British Columbia's northwest coast got a side of shaking with their breakfast Tuesday morning after a 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast.

The quake hit in the southern Queen Charlotte Islands region off the west coast at around 7:30 a.m. local time, according to Earthquakes Canada.

The earthquake was centered 260 kilometres southwest of Prince Rupert at a depth of 6.2 miles. An aftershock with a 5.6 magnitude was recorded six minutes after the initial quake.

Queen Charlotte Island resident Rick Baerg said his whole family was woken up by the shaking in their bedrooms.

"It was like someone was pushing on the bed really hard," he told ctvbc.ca. "The whole house was moving. I thought half the hill behind our house was going to come down."

Witnesses reported feeling shocks as far away as 550 kilometres from the epicenter.

Jesse Taggart-Kim at the Island Sunrise Caf� in Masset said streetlights outside her workplace were swaying.

"It felt like I was swaying in a canoe," she told CTV News. "I've never felt anything like it."

There are no reports of damage. The Tsunami Warning Centre in Palmer, Alaska reported the quake did not trigger a tsunami.

An active region

The Queen Charlotte Islands are situated along the southern end of the Queen Charlotte Fault, a fault line that produces significant earthquakes every three to 30 years.

"This is an extremely active region," John Cassidy, an earthquake scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, told CTV News.

Canada's largest-ever recorded earthquake, an 8.1 magnitude, struck in the same area in 1949.

Cassidy said earthquakes with a magnitude of six to seven are extremely common in this region of the province.

"They can be damaging," he said. "This [one] is certainly capable of causing damage but at this case it's offshore."

The most recent quake in the area was in January 2008.