New Jersey quake creates tremors in Md.

A 4.8-magnitude earthquake struck New Jersey Friday morning, rattling parts of Maryland and other surrounding states, though there are no reports of major damage.

The quake hit at 10:23 a.m. more than 40 miles west of New York City near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Online reports from the public indicated the quake could be felt strongly in nearby New York City, and up and down the East Coast.

Some reported feeling the quake in Baltimore and Annapolis, as well as the Eastern Shore and Washington, D.C.

The Maryland Department of Emergency Management said Friday afternoon that the quake’s impact on the state appeared “minimal,” but in some homes and offices around the state, dishes rattled and desks shook, causing residents to take notice. Emergency officials in Baltimore and several surrounding counties said they hadn’t received any reports of damage.

A 4.8-magnitude quake is “not large enough to cause damage, apart from light effects in the immediate epicentral region,” read a tweet from the Geological Survey. “It is large enough to be strongly felt, especially in the east, where earthquake shaking travels through the crust more efficiently than it does out west.”

Still, the earthquake caused some disruptions, as officials inspected key infrastructure such as railroads and airfields for damage.

The quake struck little more than a week after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, hours before the arrival of President Joe

Biden, who came to Baltimore to survey the wreckage and meet with the families of the six victims. A spokesperson at the information center for the bridge said they were unaware of any impact from the quake on the recovery effort.

Some flights into East Coast airports, including Newark, were diverted or delayed amid inspections. At BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, officials inspected the airfield and air traffic control tower and found no damage, said spokesman Jonathan Dean in a statement.

Amtrak took precautionary measures, including speed restrictions for trains, while it inspected tracks across the Northeast, said spokesperson Beth Toll. Normal service had resumed by late Friday afternoon.

In Baltimore, a seismometer on the Johns

Hopkins University campus captured the ground shaking “a fraction of a millimeter per second” during the earthquake, said Benjamin Fernando, a seismologist at the university. Though it doesn’t sound like much, that sort of vibration is easily perceptible, he said.

“It’s certainly strong enough that you would probably notice the ground shaking, you might notice your house shaking,” he said.

The Hopkins seismometer captured the tremor for about two minutes, with a peak amplitude around 10:24 a.m., Fernando said. Around the Baltimore area, further from the epicenter, there could be plenty of variation in how strongly the quake was felt. Areas with bedrock tend to feel less shaking than areas with softer sediments, for instance.

In midtown Manhattan, the usual cacophony of traffic grew louder during the quake, as motorists blared their horns on momentarily shuddering streets. Traffic through the Holland Tunnel between Jersey City, New Jersey, and lower Manhattan was stopped for about 10 minutes for inspections, the Port Authority of New York and Jersey said.

New York City had no indications of major safety or infrastructure problems from the earthquake, said Mayor Eric Adams, who said he didn’t feel the quake himself. City Buildings Commissioner James Oddo said officials would watch out for any delayed cracks or other effects on the Big Apple’s 1.1 million buildings.

The shaking stirred memories of Aug. 23, 2011, when an earthquake jolted Baltimore in addition to tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada. Registering a magnitude of 5.8, it was the strongest quake to hit the East Coast since World War II. The epicenter was in Virginia. That earthquake left cracks in the Washington Monument, spurred the evacuation of the White House and Capitol and rattled New Yorkers three weeks before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Earthquakes are less common on this side of the U.S. because the East Coast does not lie on a boundary of tectonic plates. But East Coast quakes can still pack a punch — its rocks are better at spreading earthquake energy across far distances.

“If we had the same magnitude quake in California, it probably wouldn’t be felt nearly as far away,” said U.S.G.S. geophysicist Paul Caruso.