UN Security Council diplomats were shaken in their chairs, planes were briefly grounded and furniture rattled across New York on Friday when an earthquake jolted the city that never sleeps.
No one was hurt and New York’s iconic skyline remained intact.
“I AM FINE,” the Empire State Building wrote on X.
Photo: Bloomberg
More than 42 million people might have felt the midmorning quake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8, centered near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, about 72km west of New York City and 80km north of Philadelphia, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said.
People from Baltimore to Boston and beyond felt the ground shake, and nearly 30 people were displaced when officials evacuated three multifamily homes in Newark, New Jersey, to check for damage.
Officials around the region were inspecting 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 as a precaution.
Photo: Reuters
Pictures and decorative plates tumbled off the wall in Christiann Thompson’s house near 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,” Thompson said.
Shortly before 6pm the region was shaken by a magnitude 4 aftershock, the USGS said.
“I AM STILL FINE,” the Empire State building wrote on X.
At the UN, a Security Council meeting on the situation in Gaza was temporarily paused after the initial tremor.
“Is that an earthquake?” said Save the Children representative Janti Soeripto, who was speaking at the time.
“One for the memoirs,” a diplomat joked.
A short time later many of their cellphones blared with the sound of the emergency alert system confirming the quake.
Although earthquakes are less common on the eastern than western edges of the US because the East Coast does not lie on a boundary of tectonic plates, 13 earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or stronger have been recorded since 1950 within 500km of Friday’s temblor, the USGS said.
A magnitude 4.8 quake is not large enough to cause damage, except for some minor effects near the epicenter, the agency wrote on X.
By comparison, the temblor that killed at least 13 people and injured more than 1,000 in Taiwan on Wednesday was measured at a magnitude of 7.4.
Friday’s quake was sensed as far as Maine, where “it felt like the floor was almost doing the wave” in Meghan Hebert’s South Portland apartment.
Some Vermont and New Hampshire residents initially said they thought it was snow falling off their roofs or plow trucks rumbling by, while in Hartford, Connecticut, paralegal Stacy Santa Cruz said she watched her computer screen shake.
Philadelphia high-school student Ian Ventura took the quake as a sign of ominous times, coming between the Taiwan temblor and tomorrow’s total solar eclipse in North America.
Scared for the world’s future, “I might take some risks, text this one girl,” Ventura, 16, said. “I got the message typed out. I might send it.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including