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.”
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant