At a New Jersey general store near the epicenter, the sound was so loud that employees thought a truck had crashed into the building.
Five miles away, in some stables, the ground shook violently and three horses galloped around the ring.
Within hours, custom T-shirt shops in Manhattan were already selling souvenirs. It's a shirt that says, “Survived the April 5, 2024 New York City Earthquake.”
For most of the millions of people who felt the magnitude 4.8 earthquake that shook everything from Philadelphia to Boston on Friday morning, it was a harmless novelty in some parts of the country unaccustomed to earthquake shaking. was.
But the rattling sound shook buildings in New York City, forcing startled residents onto the streets. Aftershocks continued throughout the day Friday, reaching magnitude 4.0 just before 6 p.m., and were felt across large areas of New York and New Jersey.
Kishor S. Jaiwal, a research structural engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey, said aftershocks “could last for days or even a week.” He said there was also a small chance that an earthquake of similar or larger magnitude could occur during such a sequence.
New York state officials said they were in contact with each county and nuclear facility in the state and had no reports of damage other than the gas leak in Rockland County. “Fortunately, here in New York state, we are masters of disaster,” Governor Kathy Hochul said. “We know how to deal with this.”
New Jersey Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who was attending the conference from out of state, said in a television interview that reports of structural damage were “minimal.”
The quake, centered at Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, about 40 miles west of New York City, was the third strongest quake within 400 miles of the city since 1950, according to USGS data.
Although sirens were heard across New York, police, fire and Con Edison stations said there were no immediate reports of damage. Mayor Eric Adams, who was attending a gun violence prevention conference at Gracie Mansion, said he didn't feel the earthquake but was informed by officials. “New Yorkers should go about their daily lives as usual,” he said at a midday news conference.
But the earthquake also revealed glaring flaws in New York City's emergency alert system, after the Adams administration has been criticized for its slow response to flooding and wildfire smoke. On Friday, a beeping text alert was received more than 30 minutes after the quake warning residents to stay indoors. (In earthquake-prone areas like California and Japan, networks of seismic sensors detect shaking, so you can receive alerts seconds before an earthquake occurs.)
New York City Emergency Management Director Zach Iskol defended the city's warning, saying officials needed confirmation from the USGS that the shaking was actually caused by an earthquake. Alerts were sent out in 14 languages.
Friday's shaking was tiny by the standards of the largest earthquakes that can cause large-scale destruction. The magnitude 6.7 earthquake that struck Los Angeles' Northridge neighborhood in 1994 caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 57 people, but was more than 700 times stronger than the quake that struck the Northeast on Friday. .
At its epicenter in New Jersey, Friday's quake produced a tremor of about V on the Mercalli intensity scale. This is the average strength of the shaking reported by people who experienced it. The scale uses Roman numerals. According to Ron Hamburger, one of the nation's leading structural engineers specializing in seismic safety, damage to buildings typically begins at scale VII. Friday's earthquake “would have been nothing in California,” he said.
But many people around New York and New Jersey were surprised by the sudden shaking and unfamiliarity with earthquakes.
At Whitehouse Station, Valorie Brennan heard what sounded like a train before feeling the shaking.
“I thought the furnace had exploded,” she said. “My dogs ran to the back of the house to hide.”
At a riding stable in Califon, New Jersey, a photo of a show jumping horse fell from the harness room wall and shattered as the jockey dismounted and tried to soothe the shivering horse as aftershocks rumbled beneath its hooves.
In Manhattan's Marble Hill neighborhood, Ada Carrasco was washing dishes in her third-floor apartment when the shaking started. “I felt it, but at first I thought I was getting dizzy. But then the shaking continued and I ran out the door,” she said in Spanish.
“I've never experienced anything like this in my life,” said Christina Feely, who works behind the counter at the Oldwick General Store in New Jersey. There was no damage caused by the earthquake, but the sound echoed throughout the store for 30 seconds. Feeley said she saw everyone freezing and it took several minutes for the floor to be stable enough to move.
Friday's earthquake occurred along the Ramapo fault system, a fault between two rocks in the Earth's crust. This system runs through the northern arm of the Appalachians in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
A magnitude of 4.8 is quite large for this fault system, said Folarin Kolawole, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.
“We haven't had anything close to this for a long time,” Dr. Kolawole said in an interview.
At Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic temporarily delayed the start of its 11 a.m. performance as alarms were still ringing on people's phones.
At the United Nations in Manhattan, Palestinian diplomat Riyad H. Mansour said Save the Children's U.S. representative and CEO Janti Soeripto was “shaking the ground” as she updated the Gaza Security Council. ' he joked. Just when the earthquake happened.
The New York City earthquake came as a surprise to many, but seismologists say the ground is not as stable as New Yorkers believe. A 2008 study found that a magnitude 5 earthquake occurs in this region approximately once every 100 years. An even larger magnitude 7 is estimated to occur once every 3,400 years.
In the early 2000s, cities began requiring building designers to consider earthquake resistance. Before that, the main natural threat covered by urban building codes was wind, which can exert very strong pressure on buildings, especially high-rise buildings. Most of his 1.1 million buildings in New York City were built before 2000, so they weren't designed with earthquakes in mind.
However, even the new requirements are far less stringent than California's, which generally requires buildings to be designed to withstand earthquakes three times as strong. A collection of major earthquake faults in the state can produce earthquakes much more powerful than those seen on the East Coast.
“Even considering the inventory of older buildings, the risk of a major earthquake disaster occurring in New York is very low,” said Hamburger, a structural engineer specializing in seismic safety.
Hours after Friday's earthquake, business was going on as usual. NYPD Transportation Commissioner Michael Kemper said in a social media post that there were no reports of structural damage to the subway system and there were no service interruptions due to the quake.
United Airlines said in a statement that “several” flights have been diverted from Newark Liberty International Airport and that it is working to get those flights to the airport as soon as possible.
For Clara Dossetter, 23, and her father David Dossetter, 67, the earthquake brought an opportunity. Dossetter was visiting New York from San Francisco and was preparing to climb the Empire State Building when the earthquake struck. Ms. Dossetter asked her father if he should reconsider.
“He was like, 'No, it's better that way because no one's going to come,'” she said.
We received reports from all over Tohoku. Lola Fadl, Gaya gupta, harubi meko, michael wilson, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chan, emma fitzsimmons, Sarah Maslin Nir, erin nolan, Mihir Zaveri, maria kramer, grace ashford, camille baker, Lyceto Cruz, michael paulson, Patrick McGeehan and Troy Crosson.