NEW YORK (AP) – An earthquake shook the densely populated New York City metropolitan area Friday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said, with residents reporting they felt rumbling across the Northeast, including downtown Providence.
The agency reported a quake at 10:23 a.m. with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8, centered near Lebanon, N.J., or about 45 miles west of New York City and 50 miles north of Philadelphia. USGS figures indicated that the quake might have been felt by more than 42 million people.
People in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Connecticut and other areas of the Northeast reported shaking. Tremors lasting for several seconds were felt more than 200 miles away near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. In midtown Manhattan, traffic grew louder as motorists blared their horns on shuddering streets. Some Brooklyn residents heard a boom and their building shaking.
In Providence, buildings shook in the downtown area though there were no immediate signs of damage.
The Fire Department of New York said there were no initial reports of damage. New York City Mayor Eric Adams had been briefed on the quake, his spokesperson Fabien Levy said, adding, "While we do not have any reports of major impacts at this time, we're still assessing the impact."
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, as an everyday memory of the dog’s older years, when her apartment started shaking hard enough that a large mirror banged audibly against a wall.
Kurtz assumed at first it was a big truck going by. The video captured her looking around, perplexed. Chiki, however, “was completely unbothered.”
Attorney Finn Dusenbery was in a law office in midtown Manhattan.
“The building shook and I thought that the ceiling above me was going to collapse,” Dusenbery said. “I did think that maybe the building was going to fall down for a second, and I wanted to get out of the building when I felt that.”
Solomon Byron was sitting on a park bench in Manhattan’s East Village.
“I felt this vibration, and I was just like, where is that vibration coming from?” Byron said. “There’s no trains nowhere close by here or anything like that.”
Byron said he didn’t realize there had been an earthquake until he got the alert on his cellphone.
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 the threat of famine in Gaza and the
Israeli drone strikes that killed aid workers there. In short order, diplomats’ phones blared with earthquake alerts.
The White House said in a statement that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the earthquake and was “in touch with federal, state, and local officials as we learn more.”
N.Y. Gov. Kathy Hochul posted on X that the quake was felt throughout the state.
“My team is assessing impacts and any damage that may have occurred, and we will update the public throughout the day,” Hochul said.
Philadelphia police asked people not to call 911 about seismic activity unless they were reporting an emergency. Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro said state officials were monitoring the situation. A spokesperson for Conn. Gov. Ned Lamont was unaware of any reports of damage in that state.
The shaking stirred memories of the Aug. 23, 2011, earthquake that jolted tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada. Registering magnitude 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, and spurred the evacuation of the White House and Capitol.
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 USGS geophysicist Paul Caruso.
(UPDATE: Story updated throughout with additional details.)
