Jerry Langley is a public servant, a Beaufort County commissioner, minister, former Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office deputy and former probation officer. This week, he added another title to the list: earthquake survivor.

Langley and his wife, Alice, were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when a magnitude 6.4 earthquake shook the island, killing one man and destroying several buildings, including a school. The Langleys had traveled to the island for the national conference of Greene Lamp Community Action; Jerry Langley, a relatively new board member who filled in when another board member had to bow out of the trip.

“I got here just in time to experience the earthquake,” Langley said from San Juan on Thursday.

It was the couple’s first night on the island, and they were asleep when the earthquake hit at 3:24 a.m.

“I woke up, the door’s rattling, the walls were shaking, the bed is shaking, the clothes in the closet were swaying back and forth,” Langley said. “You know how you watch things on TV —  where you see the dishes fall and the cabinets shaking around — that’s what it’s like, but there’s nothing like being in the midst of it. … It gives you a feeling of helplessness. I mean, what do you do?”

Langley said he and his wife scrambled to get dressed and joined other patrons of the Courtyard by Marriott outside, where they stayed for hours. Power was out throughout the island. Though the hotel generators were eventually turned on, the event wasn’t over yet.

“Two or three hours later, we got an aftershock, and you think, ‘Well, is this it?’ again,” he said.

That aftershock registered a magnitude of 5.8—there have been many more of lesser magnitude since. Over the past several months, Puerto Rico has experienced a rash of earthquakes, and more than 500 since Dec. 28, all thought to have originated from a fault only detected in the past several years.

“The discovery of the North Boquerón Bay – Punta Montalva fault was important because it was not in the USGS fault database for Puerto Rico, and even then scientists knew it posed a serious threat to the nearby population. The current seismicity appears to represent activation of a further southeasterly seaward extension of this relatively newly recognized fault,” reads a Jan. 7 article by University of Puerto Rico Department of Geology professors Alberto M. Lopez, K. Stephen Hughes and Elizabeth Vanacore.

The Langleys witnessed the strongest earthquake to affect the island in 100 years courtesy of that fault. Though San Juan is approximately 90 miles from its epicenter, nine miles off the coast of the town of Guayanilla in the southwestern part of the island, the quake was strongly felt across the entire island.

“I really know how bad it has to be in the center of the earthquake, but where we were was bad enough for me,” Langley said.

The Langleys head home to Beaufort County on Friday; as to whether they’ll ever go back to Puerto Rico, the jury is still out.

“It’s beautiful — it is that. I’ve been contemplating this. I like it. There a lot things that I really wanted to do, that I really wanted to see, so I might come back — but this year, I said, ‘I ain’t never coming back,’” he laughed.