Earthquake centered between NYC, Philadelphia rattles the Northeast
NEW YORK >> An earthquake centered between New York and Philadelphia shook skyscrapers and suburbs across the northeastern U.S. Friday, causing no major damage but startling millions of people in an area unaccustomed to such tremors.
The U.S. Geological Survey said over 42 million people might have felt the midmorning quake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8, centered near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, or about 45 miles west of New York City and 50 miles north of Philadelphia.
People from Baltimore to Boston and beyond reported feeling the ground shake. While there were no immediate reports of serious damage, officials were checking bridges and other major infrastructure, some flights were diverted or delayed, Amtrak slowed trains throughout the busy Northeast Corridor and a Philadelphia-area commuter rail line suspended service out of what it said was “an abundance of caution.”
Pictures and decorative plates tumbled off the wall in Christiann Thompson's house in Whitehouse Station, she said, relaying what her husband had told her by phone as she volunteered at a library.
“The dogs lost their minds and got very terrified and ran around,” she said.
Whitehouse Station Fire Chief Tim Apgar said no injuries were reported, but responders fielded some calls from people who smelled gas. Some stones were knocked loose at a historic site, Col. John Taylor's Grist Mill, which was built in 1760 and supplied grain to George Washington's troops during the American Revolution.
In a 26th-floor midtown Manhattan office, Shawn Clark felt the quake and initially feared an explosion or construction accident. It was “pretty weird and scary,” the attorney said.
Earthquakes are less common on the eastern than western edges of the U.S. because the East Coast does not lie on a boundary of tectonic plates. The biggest Eastern quakes usually occur along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, which extends through Iceland and the Atlantic Ocean.
Quakes on the East Coast can still pack a punch, as its rocks are better than their western counterparts at spreading earthquake energy across long distances.
“If we had the same magnitude quake in California, it probably wouldn't be felt nearly as far away,” said USGS geophysicist Paul Caruso.
A 4.8-magnitude quake isn't large enough to cause damage, except for some minor effects near the epicenter, the agency posted on the social platform X.
Still, Friday's quake caused some disruption.
Flights to the New York, Newark and Baltimore airports were held at their origins for a time while officials inspected runways for cracks. The Seton Hall University men's basketball team said its flight to Newark was held in Indianapolis, where the team won the National Invitational Tournament on Thursday, and the flight delay would likely postpone a welcome-home celebration scheduled for Friday afternoon on Seton Hall's New Jersey campus.
At least five flights en route to Newark were diverted and landed at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where some passengers rented carts to get home.
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.
In midtown Manhattan, motorists blared their horns on shuddering streets. Some Brooklyn residents heard a boom and felt their building shaking. Cellphone circuits were overloaded for a time as people tried to reach loved ones and figure out what was going on.
Later, phones blared with earthquake alerts during the New York Philharmonic's morning performance, punctuating the finale of Anton Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra.
The piece “literally ended with a cellphone alert,” said Adam Crane, the philharmonic's vice president for external affairs.
At U.N. headquarters in New York, the shaking interrupted the chief executive of Save The Children, Janti Soeripto, as she briefed an emergency Security Council session on conditions in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war.
In New York City's Astoria neighborhood, Cassondra Kurtz was giving her 14-year-old Chihuahua, Chiki, a cocoa-butter rubdown for her dry skin. Kurtz was recording the moment on video when her apartment started shaking hard enough that a large mirror banged audibly against a wall.
Kurtz assumed at first it was passing truck. The video captured her looking around, perplexed. Chiki, however, “was completely unbothered.”