A rare 4.8 magnitude earthquake followed by an aftershock struck on Friday very close to New York, causing the megacity to shake slightly for a few seconds without causing any injuries or damage, but interrupting a UN Security Council meeting on Gaza.
“I’M STILL OKAY”, wrote with humor on his X account (former Twitter) the communication from the emblematic Empire State Building skyscraper after a magnitude 4 aftershock at 9:59 p.m. GMT (5:59 p.m. local) in New Jersey, State border of New York, according to the American Institute of Geophysics (USGS).
The USGS announced in the morning that an earthquake — very infrequent on the east coast compared to California — had occurred at 2:23 p.m. GMT (10:23 a.m. local) near the town of Whitehouse Station, in New Jersey, a few dozen kilometers from New York.
Immediately, the Empire State Building assured him on X, the old Twitter: “I’M OKAY”.
By midday, President Joe Biden had wanted to be reassuring: “Things are back to normal.”
But this brief shock – the last serious one recorded dates from 1884 – was felt in Manhattan and Brooklyn, causing a general mobilization of the American media and a deluge of messages and photos – often humorous – on social networks.
“I’m shaking”
“I’m nervous, I’m shaking. Oh, my God (…), this has never happened here (…) A lot of people are afraid,” exclaimed, at the time, Ana Villagran, a 62-year-old resident of Brooklyn interviewed by AFPTV.
Dominika Uniejewska, a store manager in Lebanon, New Jersey, “didn’t understand what was happening at first.”
“I have never experienced such a strong earthquake,” she told AFP by telephone. Her “entire house really shook, the bed shook, the house was making noise, very loud,” she testified.
Mary White, on the contrary, a 70-year-old retiree from Brooklyn, was “not afraid.”
“I said to myself: ‘what has to happen, happens (…) We can’t stop Nature’.”
For Victoria Suarez and Hunter Garrisson, thirty-something tourists from Texas, “it wasn’t even a big shake, just a little shock.”
“I survived”
New Yorkers posted photos of overturned lawn chairs with a tongue-in-cheek message: “We will rebuild.” Others suggested a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I survived the NYC earthquake.”
But authorities urged caution in a city that has experienced a number of attacks, including September 11, and natural and health disasters.
“New Yorkers must remain alert and follow the usual precautions even if the probability of aftershocks is low,” Mayor Eric Adams wrote on X while New York State Governor Kathy Hochul recalled that “in the event of a response, (you had to) get on the ground, protect your head and neck, under a piece of furniture, near a wall or a doorway.”
“An earthquake?”
At United Nations headquarters, cameras filming the Security Council meeting on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza began to shake.
The representative of the NGO Save the Children, Janti Soeripto, interrupted her speech denouncing the famine and deaths in Gaza.
“Is that an earthquake?” she asked.
The meeting was interrupted a second time when everyone’s phones started ringing and vibrating due to emergency alerts sent by the municipality.
On the transport side, the American Civil Aviation Agency (FAA) quickly warned of difficulties at airports in the northeast of the country, then that things had returned more or less to normal despite some delays at JFK airports. and Newark.
“Earthquakes are rare, but not impossible along the Atlantic coast, a region called by geologists the passive aggressive margin to describe this area where the Atlantic plate and that of North America meet,” according to the USGS.
“An earthquake of magnitude 4.7 or 4.8 is enough to shake the walls a little, but generally does not cause any serious damage,” reassured Kenneth Miller, geologist at Rutgers University.
