四 川 铁 FourRiverIron

Washington D.C. 5.8 Earthquake

  Source

5.8 Virginia earthquake shakes East Coast, rattles residents

By Joel Achenbach, Published: August 23

A rare, powerful 5.8-magnitude earthquake rattled the eastern third of the United States on Tuesday afternoon, damaging older buildings, shutting down much of the nation’s capital and unnerving tens of millions of people from New England to the Carolinas.

It was not a killer quake, nor even a particularly injurious one. But if it didn’t add up to a natural disaster, it was still a startling geological event, the strongest East Coast tremor in 67 years, and it effectively blew up the workday in Washington.

Any assumption that the region is seismically serene was corrected at 1:51 p.m. when a fault near the small town of Mineral, Va., suddenly ruptured. In Boston or Charleston or Detroit it might have felt like a sudden case of vertigo. Closer to the epicenter it was not so subtle. It began with a shudder, as if a helicopter were landing nearby or perhaps someone had turned on a large piece of machinery. Within a couple of seconds, it grew into a heaving, bucking, no-doubt-about-it earthquake.

It was over in less than a minute. Workers surged out of office buildings, and cellphone networks quickly clogged. The Federal Emergency Management Agency eventually sent out a statement asking the public to switch to e-mail or text messages.

Capstones, known as finials, fell from three spires on Washington National Cathedral, and cracks appeared in the flying buttresses on the older east side. “Please pray for the Cathedral as there has been some damage,” the cathedral said in its official Twitter feed.

An inspection turned up cracks “at the very, very top” of the Washington Monument, said National Park Service spokesman Bill Line. The 555-foot-tall stone obelisk will remain closed and “could be closed for an indefinite period of time.”

More than 500 people were displaced in Prince George’s County as authorities condemned and evacuated two high-rise apartment buildings.

The Old Soldiers’ Home had structural damage, as did the Ecuadoran Embassy. The White House and the Capitol were evacuated, as were countless Washington area office buildings. Georgetown University, the Smithsonian museums and D.C. federal courts closed.

On Tuesday evening, federal and local officials were still scrutinizing some public buildings and trying to decide whether and when to reopen.

The first warnings of the earthquake may have occurred at the National Zoo, where officials said some animals seemed to feel it coming before people did. The red ruffed lemurs began “alarm calling” a full 15 minutes before the quake hit, zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Masson said. In the Great Ape House, Iris, an orangutan, let out a guttural holler 10 seconds before keepers felt the quake. The flamingos huddled together in the water seconds before people felt the rumbling. The rheas got excited. And the hooded mergansers — a kind of duck — dashed for the safety of the water.

For people, it was a lovely, sparkling day for an emergency evacuation. Much of the capital’s workforce had gathered on sidewalks by 2 p.m. The federal government later urged agencies to send non-emergency workers home.


Source

Schools, D.C. landmarks and some federal agencies closed in quake’s aftermath

By Martin Weil, Coleen O’Lear and Justin Jouvenal

Federal agencies inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway are open with unscheduled leave and unscheduled telework available, but two of Washington’s principal landmarks and some schools are expected to be closed today.

Here are some of the closures; check with government offices and come back to PostLocal for more updates.

FEDERAL AGENCIES

Federal executive branch departments and agencies inside the Beltway are open with unscheduled leave and unscheduled telework available in accordance with agency guidelines, the Office of Personnel Management said.

Some federal buildings are closed pending further inspection. OPM has compiled a list of closures, but check with your agency if you’re unsure. Here’s a list of building closures as of early Wednesday morning:

D.C.

• Federal Aviation Administration (headquarters)

Department of Health and Human Services (Hubert Humphrey Building)

• Department of Labor (Frances Perkins Building)

• Independent U.S. Government Offices (National Building Museum)

• National Endowment for the Arts (Post Office Old)

• Department of Agriculture (Agriculture South)

• Department of Homeland Security (Nebraska Avenue Complex)

• Department of the Interior (headquarters)

Virginia

• Department of Commerce (Building A)

Maryland

• Office of the Secretary of Defense (One White Flint North)

• Department of Health & Human Services

• Archives

Emergency employees are expected to report for work on time, but non-emergency employees (including those on pre-approved paid leave) will be granted excused absence for the number of hours they were scheduled to work, unless:

• The employee is required to telework by his or her agency’s official policy as reflected in his or her written telework agreement;

• The employee works or is on official travel outside the Washington, D.C., area;

• The employee is on leave without pay; or

• The employee is on an alternative work schedule day off.

Officials said further changes to the agency closures list will not be posted on the OPM Web site again until 4 a.m. Thursday.

Reopening today will be U.S. Capitol and nearby House and Senate office buildings — all of which underwent inspections Tuesday.

AREA SCHOOLS

District of Columbia public schools will be closed today. Students and staff should not report, but custodians should remain on standby. Staff assigned to administrative sites, including Central Office, should report as scheduled.

Prince George’s County public schools, Fauquier County public schools, Culpeper County public schools and the Spotsylvania County public schools will be closed today.

All Prince William County Schools facilities will be open today, with certain areas of some facilities being off limits.

Bull Run Elementary School in Fairfax County also will be closed to employees; schools open for students in Virginia after Labor Day.

In Alexandria, portions of City Hall will be closed, including the Sister Cities Conference Center rooms. For more information, go to alexandriava.gov/Earthquake.

LANDMARKS

As a result of damage from Tuesday’s earthquake, the Washington Monument , the Smithsonian castle on the National Mall and Washington National Cathedral will be closed, authorities said.


Source

5.8 Virginia earthquake shakes East Coast, rattles residents

By Joel Achenbach, Published: August 23

A rare, powerful 5.8-magnitude earthquake rattled the eastern third of the United States on Tuesday afternoon, damaging older buildings, shutting down much of the nation’s capital and unnerving tens of millions of people from New England to the Carolinas.

It was not a killer quake, nor even a particularly injurious one. But if it didn’t add up to a natural disaster, it was still a startling geological event, the strongest East Coast tremor in 67 years, and it effectively blew up the workday in Washington.

Any assumption that the region is seismically serene was corrected at 1:51 p.m. when a fault near the small town of Mineral, Va., suddenly ruptured. In Boston or Charleston or Detroit it might have felt like a sudden case of vertigo. Closer to the epicenter it was not so subtle. It began with a shudder, as if a helicopter were landing nearby or perhaps someone had turned on a large piece of machinery. Within a couple of seconds, it grew into a heaving, bucking, no-doubt-about-it earthquake.

It was over in less than a minute. Workers surged out of office buildings, and cellphone networks quickly clogged. The Federal Emergency Management Agency eventually sent out a statement asking the public to switch to e-mail or text messages.

Capstones, known as finials, fell from three spires on Washington National Cathedral, and cracks appeared in the flying buttresses on the older east side. “Please pray for the Cathedral as there has been some damage,” the cathedral said in its official Twitter feed.

An inspection turned up cracks “at the very, very top” of the Washington Monument, said National Park Service spokesman Bill Line. The 555-foot-tall stone obelisk will remain closed and “could be closed for an indefinite period of time.”

More than 500 people were displaced in Prince George’s County as authorities condemned and evacuated two high-rise apartment buildings.

The Old Soldiers’ Home had structural damage, as did the Ecuadoran Embassy. The White House and the Capitol were evacuated, as were countless Washington area office buildings. Georgetown University, the Smithsonian museums and D.C. federal courts closed.

On Tuesday evening, federal and local officials were still scrutinizing some public buildings and trying to decide whether and when to reopen.

The first warnings of the earthquake may have occurred at the National Zoo, where officials said some animals seemed to feel it coming before people did. The red ruffed lemurs began “alarm calling” a full 15 minutes before the quake hit, zoo spokeswoman Pamela Baker-Masson said. In the Great Ape House, Iris, an orangutan, let out a guttural holler 10 seconds before keepers felt the quake. The flamingos huddled together in the water seconds before people felt the rumbling. The rheas got excited. And the hooded mergansers — a kind of duck — dashed for the safety of the water.

For people, it was a lovely, sparkling day for an emergency evacuation. Much of the capital’s workforce had gathered on sidewalks by 2 p.m. The federal government later urged agencies to send non-emergency workers home.

The early evening commute degenerated into gridlock, with traffic lights out on some major streets. Metro slowed trains to 15 mph while inspecting for damage. Train service in the Northeast corridor ground to a halt temporarily while engineers examined the tracks.

The two Dominion nuclear plants in North Anna, Va., 10 miles from the epicenter, shut down automatically when the quake hit. They lost power from the grid and switched to four diesel generators, according to a spokesman at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Bill Hall, spokesman for Dominion, said: “I’m in headquarters in Richmond, which is right next to a train track. I thought, ‘That train is going by awfully fast,’ and I looked and there was no train.”

Melvin Robinson Jr. of Fort Washington said he thought the earthquake was the latest gimmick from Hollywood. He was watching the new “Spy Kids” movie in 4-D at a theater on Route 1 in Alexandria with his children Camille, 11, and Melvin III, 10, when the room began shaking violently.

“We were watching the movie, and the chairs in the entire row began to shake left to right. We thought it was the special effects,” Robinson said. Someone then came on an intercom and told the moviegoers to evacuate.

The quake struck near the tail end of the second day of school for tens of thousands of Washington area students. A few minor injuries were reported in the District and Prince George’s. There was damage to some schools in both jurisdictions, as well as in Fairfax County, where the school year has not begun. Prince George’s officials announced late Tuesday that schools would be closed Wednesday to allow more time for inspections. Roosevelt and School Without Walls high schools in the District will be closed Wednesday because of damage.

Officials at the Columbia Heights Education Campus on 16th Street NW said students left the building in an orderly manner, mustering on the football field along with infants and toddlers who were wheeled in cribs from the school’s day-care center. But some students said the scene inside was panicky, with kids pushing on the staircases of the four-story building.

“It was a disaster,” said Diana Romero, a junior. “People were pushing and shoving, trying to get out. Some people were crying from the shock.”

Virginia officials were ramped up for a potential natural disaster, but they were thinking of Hurricane Irene, thousands of miles away. In Fairfax, the quake did not halt democracy: Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova (D) vowed that a primary election would continue even if poll workers had to operate in the parking lots of closed buildings and use paper ballots.

In New York, Wall Street took a break as traders evacuated their buildings. The quake interrupted a prosecutor’s news conference about the dismissal of sexual assault charges against former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The tremor was spawned in an unmapped fault near Mineral, about 87 miles southwest of Washington. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) received reports that the seismic waves were felt as far away as St. Louis, Montreal and Jacksonville, Fla.

“Biggest event in east since seismometers,” tweeted a College of William & Mary geologist, Chuck Bailey. He had been in a meeting with other geologists when the quake hit. They all looked at one another and realized immediately what was going on.

“It was sort of a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake. A once-in-a-century earthquake,” Bailey said.

Geologists — including USGS scientists who evacuated to the parking lot outside their Reston headquarters — warned that aftershocks may strike for several days. Three small aftershocks were reported by Tuesday evening.

“Aftershocks could go on for days, weeks or even months,” said Mike Blanpied, associate coordinator of the USGS’s earthquake hazards program.

He said it is unlikely that the 5.8-magnitude quake was a foreshock of a stronger tremor because it was near the limit of what has been experienced in this region of Virginia. The last Virginia quake of this intensity was in 1897, a tremor felt as far south as Georgia and as far west as Indiana.

“In terms of energy release, a fairly run-of-the-mill earthquake,” USGS Director Marcia McNutt wrote in an e-mail, “but because the rocks along the East coast do such a superior job of transmitting seismic energy without dissipating it, the tremor was widely felt. “

McNutt — who watched her rock hammer leap from a shelf in her Reston office — offered advice on what to do the next time the ground shakes: “Duck, get under something sturdy like a desk or a doorway, get away from falling glass. Make sure that you are not in the way of falling objects like pictures, bookshelves, books, anything that’s not firmly connected the wall.”

Californians scoffed at Washington jitters. Relaxing on the fence wall in front of the White House, Monda Tajbakhsh, 54, and her friend, just off the red-eye from San Francisco, were amused by the capital’s reaction to “a tiny 5-point something!” Tajbakhsh said. “I found it really amusing. Wolf Whatever-his-name-is was on the television!”

A group of Montgomery College students did not evacuate from the financial aid office, spokeswoman Beth Homan said. Financial aid is key before classes start next week, and they didn’t want to lose their places in line.

The sun hadn’t even gone down on this unusual Washington day before someone had found a commercial angle. A General Motors dealership on Route 355 in Rockville began advertising “aftershock price reductions!”

The following reporters and researchers contributed to coverage of the earthquake: Lauren Abdel-Razzaq, Joel Achenbach, Keith L. Alexander, Isaac Arnsdorf, Melissa Bell, Victoria Benning, Bonnie Benwick, Mark Berman, Laura Blumenfeld, Michelle Boorstein, Emma Brown, Jennifer Buske, Michael Alison Chandler, Christian Davenport, Marcia Davis, Mike DeBonis, Daniel de Vise, Karen DeYoung, Dan Eggen, Juliet Eilperin, Maggie Fazeli Fard, Mary Pat Flaherty, Elizabeth Flock, Amy Gardner, Caitlin Gibson, Ashley Halsey III, Fritz Hahn, Hamil Harris, Dana Hedgpeth, Rosalind S. Helderman, Steve Hendrix, Spencer Hsu, Jennifer Jenkins, Jenna Johnson, Paul Kane, John Kelly, Cecilia Kang, Anita Kumar, Fredrick Kunkle, Theola Labbé-DeBose, Michael Laris, Madonna Lebling, Carol D. Leonnig, Peter Marks, Ned Martel, Greg Miller, Carol A. Morello, Dan Morse, Steven Mufson, David Nakamura, Ed O’Keefe, Steven Overly, Michael E. Ruane, Jason Samenow, Robert Samuels, Matt Schudel, Lucy Shackelford, Ian Shapira, T. Rees Shapiro, Annys Shin, Delece Smith-Barrow, Jillian Sowah, Katherine Shaver, Jillian S. Sowah, Miranda S. Spivack, Nikita Stewart, Valerie Strauss, Lena Sun, Susan Svrluga, Patricia Sullivan, Paul Tenorio, Avis Thomas-Lester, Cheryl Thompson, Robert Thomson, Bill Turque, Theresa Vargas, John Wagner, Martin Weil, Gene Weingarten, Josh White, Ovetta Wiggins, Del Quentin Wilber, Clarence F. Williams, June Q. Wu, Victor Zapana and Matt Zapotosky.


Source

For central Virginia’s seismic zone, quake is an event of rare magnitude

By Steven Mufson and Brian Vastag, Published: August 23

For Virginia, the earthquake that struck Tuesday was the big one.

The state hasn’t suffered a quake of this size since the slightly larger one that rattled Giles County in 1897. “That’s the biggest earthquake in human history in Virginia,” said David Applegate, associate director for natural hazards at the U.S. Geological Survey. And the 5.8 quake Tuesday was as big as anything experts expect in the so-called Central Virginia Seismic Zone.

After all, this isn’t California or Japan, where vast tectonic plates are crashing into one another and jostling for position. While Virginia is an active seismic region and the nature of its bedrock can magnify the impact of tremors, the earthquakes it serves up are usually small stuff, barely noticeable temblors ranging in magnitude from 2 to 3.

The rarity of big quakes was cited by Dominion Power a few years ago when it asked for a permit to build a third nuclear unit at North Anna, Va., just 10 to 20 miles from Tuesday’s epicenter. The company cited a model that said the odds of an earthquake greater than a magnitude of 5.5 in central Virginia were slim, predicting about six such quakes over the next 10,000 years.

The 5.8 magnitude earthquake Tuesday disrupted electric power to Dominion’s two existing nuclear reactors, which quickly shut down and switched to four locomotive-size diesel generators. The reactors were built to withstand a 6.2 magnitude earthquake — four times greater than this one — and a Dominion spokesman said that the reactors and a nearby dam initially appeared to have survived intact.

But Allison Macfarlane, a professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, said that because Tuesday’s quake was shallow — just seven miles deep — it could shake the ground more than a deeper quake and threaten nuclear reactors and other buildings.

“We just learn new things all the time about the Earth. It just surprises us,” Macfarlane said.

No one understands the underlying geologic reasons for East Coast quakes. “What stresses are causing these infrequent but annoying earthquakes such as the one we just felt are not entirely understood,” said Marcia K. McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey. “The earthquakes occur in the same regions again and again, activating old faults from long-ago geologic eras.”

While earthquakes along the East Coast tend to be smaller in magnitude than those in California, they tend to be felt over a much wider area.

The Central Virginia Seismic Zone sits in the middle of the enormous North American tectonic plate — an ocean of bedrock stretching from California to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Quakes generated in the middle of a plate tend to be weaker than the temblors jarred loose when two plates rub together — the potentially devastating strike-slip quakes seismologists say could hit California at any time.

Mid-plate quakes also tend to be smaller than the type of quake that rocked Japan on March 11. That 9.0 monster was unleashed when one tectonic plate slid under another — a so-called subduction zone quake.

Still, mid-plate earthquakes around the world regularly top magnitude 5, said Karen Fischer, professor of geologic sciences at Brown University.

That’s because faults, breaks in the bedrock, can be hidden just about anywhere.

On Tuesday afternoon, one of these faults some four to seven miles beneath the ground near Mineral, Va., came grinding to life, releasing a wave of energy that traveled outward at a “few miles per second,” said Mike Blanpied, associate coordinator for the USGS earthquakes hazard program.

The quake could have taken place in a previously undetected fault, but it could also be linked to one of two known faults on either side, said Callan Bentley, a geology professor at Northern Virginia Community College. He said the released energy traveled “along the grain” of the Appalachian Mountains to the northeast and southwest.

Once it hit, it reverberated, shaking the ground from St. Louis to New York, from Montreal to Atlanta, according to reports collected by the USGS Web site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that while the North Anna plants were the only ones to shut down, nuclear power plants from the Carolinas to New Jersey felt the ground move slightly.

The geology of the eastern United States — which sits on top of old, cold rocks that efficiently transmit seismic waves — explains this huge shake zone.

In California, earthquakes — while more frequent — tend to travel a shorter distance. That’s because a cracked glass-like network of faults and breaks in the bedrock contains some of the seismic waves. But here in the mid-Atlantic, the older bedrock lacks such breaks, so it transmits vibrations quickly and efficiently.

“East Coast rock isn’t broken up as much,” said Mitchell Gold, a seismologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “For the same size earthquake, we feel it further than they do out west.”

The rocks under the East Coast also tend to be colder than in California, and colder rocks transmit energy more efficiently, Gold added.

Within three hours, USGS specialists had classified the Mineral quake as a “reverse” earthquake. “There is probably a fault that’s inclined like a ramp,” said Blanpied. “As the rocks get squeezed together, the upper rocks climb up the ramp by a few inches.”

When enough pressure builds, the two great sections of rock suddenly slip. On Tuesday, the upper slab slipped up and the lower slab slipped down, the opposite of what happens in a “normal” earthquake, USGS seismologists said. Blanpied estimated the slabs moved in an area three to 10 miles wide on each side.

While unusual in the mid-Atlantic region, earthquakes larger than magnitude 5 are not uncommon in the country. Last year, the United States experienced 71 earthquakes of magnitudes between 5 and 6, according to USGS data. Most of those occurred in northern California, many off the coast and far from cities, said Richard Allen, director of the seismological laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

But while the reasons for those quakes are clear, experts are debating the ultimate cause of mid-plate quakes along the East Coast.

One camp argues that the bedrock here still holds residual stress from the last time the region was geologically active, some 250 million years ago. That’s when the continent was ripping apart from Europe and Africa to form the Atlantic Ocean.

Another camp points to deeper forces, rocks that flow in Earth’s mantle, beneath the crust. “These rocks are flowing all the time, and this continuous motion puts stress on the rocks above, the crust,” Fischer said, noting the idea was “highly speculative.”

Whatever the cause, seismologists caution that after a quake shakes a fault zone, stresses transmitted to surrounding rock can cause aftershocks. Several aftershocks shook central Virginia throughout Tuesday afternoon, including a 2.2 aftershock at 3:20 p.m. and a 4.2 at 8:04 p.m. But the risk of aftershocks decreases quickly, said Bentley.

“While this feels big to us, this was not that big of a quake,” he added. “We’re not going to see a huge number of aftershocks.”

Bentley said there is a remote chance that today’s quake was a “foreshock” — a harbinger of a bigger earthquake to come. But he labeled that as a very slim possibility.

And while seismologists cannot predict when an earthquake might next strike the region, they are certain of one thing: We’ll feel another again, someday.

“We can expect [magnitude] five or so in the mid-Atlantic region,” said Gold. “But we don’t expect them very often.”


Source

Earthquake damage in D.C. will take time to assess

By Christian Davenport and Susan Svrluga, Published: August 23

As officials across the Washington region continued to assess the damage from a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, structural engineers warned that the full effect of the quake might not be known for days.

While the area seems to have fared relatively well, Tuesday’s earthquake packed a punch, toppling pinnacles at the Washington National Cathedral, displacing more than 500 residents of two Prince George’s County apartment buildings and inflicting damage at dozens of schools in Fairfax County.

After a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck the Washington area, residents and structures were shaken. The quake, at one point upgraded to a magnitude of 5.9, even caused damage to the Washington National Cathedral, sending one of its spires tumbling.

After a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck the Washington area, residents and structures were shaken. The quake, at one point upgraded to a magnitude of 5.9, even caused damage to the Washington National Cathedral, sending one of its spires tumbling.

But more damage is likely to be uncovered in coming days, engineers and others said.

Small cracks can lead to big problems over time. Gas leaking from snapped pipes is among the most serious concerns, and utility companies urged residents who smell gas to evacuate their homes immediately and call 911. They also urged people to look for cracks in drywall, shifting foundations and tiny leaks in water pipes.

Insurance officials also warned that homeowners with quake-related damage might not be covered because standard policies don’t include an earthquake provision.

Across the region, walls cracked and chunks of concrete broke off buildings. But thanks to improvements in building design and codes that require reinforcements that help buildings stay upright when the ground starts rumbling, the damage was minimized.

Many of Washington’s buildings are big, solid structures that can take a good shaking up. Some older buildings, designed when earthquakes were not a concern for architects, have been retrofitted to better withstand vibrations.

“We’re well suited in this area for the magnitude of earthquakes that are going to occur here,” said Henry Green, president of the National Institute of Building Sciences. “A 5.8 is larger than we would typically expect but not devastating.”

Bridges, however, might be another concern, said Yunfeng Zhang, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland, who noted that “because of the shaking, the bridge girder might slip a little away from the original position.”

At the Capitol, which is made of sandstone and marble with a cast-iron dome, building inspectors were looking at all of the structures in the complex Tuesday.

“At this point, we’re still doing assessments of each of the buildings, but we’re not seeing major structural damage at this time,” said Eva Malecki, a spokeswoman for the Architect of the Capitol. “These are historic buildings. They’re built to last.”

Engineers were working to make sure the Washington Monument survived the earthquake. Park officials said that the top of the 555-foot-tall stone obelisk appeared to have cracks and that the structure would remain closed pending a top-to-bottom inspection.

Park Service spokesman Bill Line emphatically denied a broadcast report that the monument was listing to one side.

“We do know that the Washington Monument is not leaning,” Line said, as mounted Park Police officers kept pedestrians away from the monument grounds. “But safety concerns are paramount, and the structural engineers are checking it out right now.”

Line could not say whether the monument, which is reportedly the tallest free-standing masonry structure in the world, has been reenforced for earthquake-resistance.

“We do adhere to the highest engineering standards, but this area is not California,” he said.

Reports of damage across the area included three fleurs-de-lis-shaped capstones that fell from corner spires of the Washington National Cathedral’s central tower.

Reached by cellphone as he was climbing to the top of the cathedral, mason Joe Alonso said that the tower, which is the highest point in Washington, “has sustained some pretty significant damage to the pinnacles.”

In Fairfax County, principals at 74 schools reported some earthquake damage, spokesman Paul Regnier said. Each school was being inspected to determine whether repairs are needed. Fairfax students do not return to classes until after Labor Day.

In Prince George’s, a shelter was being set up for hundreds of residents of badly damaged apartment buildings in Temple Hills and Hillcrest Heights, officials said.


Source

Earthquake shakes up D.C. office workers’ orderly routines

By Monica Hesse and Jason Horowitz, Published: August 23

Shaking led to confusion. Confusion led to anxiety. Anxiety led to evacuating. And then evacuating led to milling.

The earthquake that struck Washington on Tuesday shook the city’s carefully constructed rhythms. There was a looseness. A jangled quality. People who normally pass each other silently in the office stood together gossiping in the sun.

There was a sense of getting away with something, wandering outside in the middle of the day, past lunchtime, contemplating a cocktail, waiting for someone to tell you what to do, or not.

And mothers texted children. Husbands called wives. A 5.8-magnitude earthquake, and no lives were lost. People had gotten away with something.

“It kind of builds a sense of community, to all experience something beyond your control,” says Marie Brill, who works at a nonprofit organization on K Street NW. She called her husband and children immediately after the earthquake to make sure they were all right. “It gives you a moment to feel really, really lucky.”

Brill sat on the grass with a colleague at McPherson Square, which was packed with unhurried evacuees from the surrounding buildings. One smartly dressed woman carried a neon disaster-preparedness kit and connected with someone back home: “Love you. Bye bye. Kiss the cat for me, okay?” On the northern corner, Jim Shuff stood under a cluster of trees with a cluster of his co-workers. “I don’t feel like going back to work is a priority now,” he said. “We could be a bit traumatized.”

“We’re actually kind of enjoying it,” said his colleague Lisa Smith.

Another co-worker told the group that she was heading back to work.

“Are you going to come back inside?” she asked.

“In a minute,” Smith said.

Flouting work in Washington is unusual. People take pride in not seeing the sun for days, for working through lunch, for BlackBerry addiction. For a few minutes Tuesday, much of that went away. Twitter feeds stopped flowing. E-mail went down. Cellphones lost their bars.

Bars found their patrons.

“I’m like, ‘Everyone, suck it up and suck it down,’ ” said Chris Houk, a manager at the downtown bar and restaurant Lincoln, where happy hour was an hour-and-a-half early and a table of lawyers had just ordered the “Emancipation Punch Bowl.”

“I’m from California,” he said. “Over there, we roll over and go back to sleep when this kind of quake hits.”

People from California reminded everyone that they were from California.

“It felt like it was a rolling one,” said Jenna Weisbord, a Los Angeles native who works at the International Franchise Association at 15th and K streets NW. She offered guidance to her novice colleagues.

“I learned about the triangle of life!” her co-worker Lynette Darby said, referring to a theory about how to survive an earthquake.

This being Washington, some people found a way to work — they just had to go alfresco.

“We’ve been running staff meetings,” said Fred Hochberg, president of the government’s Export-Import Bank, who received a briefing about solar panels from the head of his renewable energy department at Lafayette Square.

Across the park, administration officials and first residence employees kept to their cliques as they waited to reenter the White House. A group of press office staffers stood under a tree. White House plumbers kicked back under another. White House cooks in white coats stood alone on a patch of grass, while some junior staffers sat in a circle, looking like an outdoor freshman English seminar.

For all of the damage the earthquake caused, it also pushed people out of their offices and then their buildings and then into the streets, where, for a brief time, they waited together.

“People started coming over,” Devorah Lewis, a cafeteria worker in the Veterans Affairs basement, said of the people she usually knows only as lunch orders. On Tuesday, she said, “I got to talk to some of them.”

Staff writer Emily Wax contributed to this report.


Source

East Coast earthquake: Search for hidden damage under way

Aug. 24, 2011 06:23 AM

Associated Press

MINERAL, Va. - Office buildings, schools and towering landmarks were being inspected Wednesday for hidden structural flaws a day after initial checks turned up little damage from a rare East Coast earthquake.

Public schools and a handful of government buildings in Washington remained closed for further assessment, and engineers were taking a closer look at cracks in the Washington Monument and broken capstones at the National Cathedral. Some residents of D.C. suburbs were staying in shelters because of structural concerns at their apartment buildings.

Further south, Tuesday's 5.8-magnitude quake also shattered windows and wrecked grocery stores near its Virginia epicenter. There were no known deaths or serious injuries.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the quake serves as a reminder for residents to be prepared.

"We talk about hurricanes this time of year, but we forget that A: earthquakes don't have a season and B: they are not just a western hazard," FEMA administrator Craig Fugate said in an interview Wednesday on ABC's Good Morning America.

When the quake struck, many feared terrorism in New York and Washington - places where nerves are raw as the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks approaches. The tremblor sent many pouring from high-rises like the Empire State Building.

"I ran down all 60 flights," accounting office worker Caitlin Trupiano said. "I wasn't waiting for the elevator."

Chris Kardian, working in his garage in suburban Richmond, Va., not far from the epicenter, opted for the more prosaic and plausible: He blamed the shaking on two of his children in the overhead playroom.

"I just thought they were running around and being really loud," he said. "After about 15 seconds, it didn't stop and I thought, I don't have that many kids in the house!' "

The most powerful earthquake to strike the East Coast in 67 years shook buildings and jarred as many as 12 million people. The U.S. Geological Survey said it was centered 40 miles northwest of Richmond in Mineral.

The U.S. Park Service evacuated and closed all monuments and memorials along the National Mall. The Pentagon, the White House, the Capitol and federal agencies in and around Washington were evacuated. Roads out of the city were clogged with commuters headed home.

Stressed-out D.C. mother of four Marion Babcock, who spent two hours traffic instead of her normal 25 minutes, did the only sensible thing for her frazzled, frightened kids: "I treated their post-traumatic stress with copious amounts of chocolate mint and cookie dough ice cream."

Between cell phones and social networks, news of the quake seemed to travel faster than the temblor itself.

Jenna Scanlon of Floral Park, N.Y., ended a phone call with someone in McLean, Va., and announced to her office colleagues there had been an earthquake. Seconds later, 7 World Trade Center began to shake.

The scope of the damage - or lack of - also quickly became clear on social networks. Instead of collapsed freeways, people posted images of toppled lawn chairs and yogurt cups, broken Bobbleheads, picture frames askew on walls.

On Facebook, people joked with posts such as "S&P has downgraded earthquake to a 2.0," a swipe at the rating agency that recently lowered the federal government's creditworthiness. Another suggested New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a large man, had just "jumped into" the presidential race.

A 5.8-magnitude quake releases as much energy as almost eight kilotons of TNT, about half the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.

Still, those along the West Coast who are used to the earth moving couldn't help but take a jab or two.

"Really all this excitement over a 5.8 quake??? Come on East Coast, we have those for breakfast out here!!!!" wrote Dennis Miller, a lifelong California resident whose Pleasanton home sits on a fault line.

A 5.8, he said, wouldn't even wake him from his sleep.

"We were laughing," said 26-year-old San Francisco resident Stellamarie Hall, "but we definitely understand that New York and certain metropolitan areas are not designed around earthquakes."

The earthquake that devastated Japan released more than 60,000 times more energy than Tuesday's, but there was real damage. At the majestic Washington National Cathedral, at least three of the four top stones on the central tower fell off, and cracks appeared in the flying buttresses at the cathedral's east end, the oldest part of the structure. The top of the Washington Monument has a crack.

Ceiling tiles fell to the floor at Reagan National Airport. The gothic-style Smithsonian Castle, built in 1857, had minor cracks and broken glass. And vigorous shaking left a crack and hole in the ceiling at historic Union Station when a chunk of plaster fell near the main entrance.

The steeple and bell tower at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Baltimore were badly damaged, and the building was closed as a precaution.

In West Virginia, environmental regulators sent engineers to inspect massive coal slurry dams that could wipe out entire communities if they were to fail and release billions of gallons of wastewater.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Valley Authority said that checks of its dams and nuclear plants in several states had turned up no problems.

Amtrak said trains along the Northeast Corridor between Baltimore and Washington were operating at reduced speeds and crews were inspecting stations and railroad infrastructure before returning to normal.

Even those who knew what was happening had braced for worse, some remembering the Indian Ocean quake that triggered a tsunami and a nuclear disaster in Japan.

"I knew it was an earthquake, but my first thought was, Oh my God, something's going to happen to the power plant," said 21-year-old Whitney Thacker in Mineral, Va., a town near the epicenter where the sidewalks were littered with fallen stones, masonry and broken glass. "It was scary."

Dominion Virginia Power shut down its two-reactor nuclear power plant within 10 miles of the quake's epicenter, but said there was no evidence of any damage to the decades-old North Anna Power Station.

In a news release, the utility company said off-site power to the nuclear plant was restored Tuesday night and it was no longer relying on backup generators. The utility didn't say when the plant's two reactors would be restarted.

By the standards of the West Coast, where earthquakes are much more common, the Virginia quake was mild. Since 1900, there have been 40 of magnitude 5.8 or greater in California alone.

But quakes in the East tend to be felt across a much broader area, the waves traveling "pretty happily out for miles," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough.

The last quake of equal power to strike the East Coast was in New York in 1944. The largest East Coast quake on record was a 7.3 that hit South Carolina in 1886.

The fear in some places was real.

Michael Leman had been mowing a neighbor's lawn in Mineral when bricks began falling from a chimney and the earth heaved a large propane tank about a foot off the ground.

"I thought that tank was about to explode," he said, "and I ran for dear life."


Source

East Coast earthquake: Cell networks clogged by calls

Aug. 23, 2011 01:26 PM

Associated Press

Cell phone and landline customers experienced connection problems after Tuesday's earthquake, but there were no immediate reports of trouble for police and rescue workers.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile did not immediately report infrastructure damage, although representatives said their networks were congested as the quake sent people scrambling for their phones.

"There were tremors, and everyone decided to call and say, 'Did you feel it?'" Verizon Wireless spokesman Tom Pica said.

The congestion was reminiscent, on a much smaller scale, to the frenzy that clogged cellular networks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Police and rescue workers now have priority phones that can get through even when there's a flurry of calls.

Still, the Federal Emergency Management Agency asked people to use text messaging or email for a few hours after the Tuesday quake to keep lines open for emergency responders.

Sprint said some customers might be experiencing delays, but spokesman John Taylor said the company had received no reports of problems from emergency personnel. A District of Columbia police spokesman said officers did not have problems responding to calls.

Pica said there was no damage to the Verizon's equipment. He said the crush of phone calls made it hard for some customers to get through for about 20 minutes after the quake, but he said the congestion appeared to be clearing later in the afternoon.


Source

West Coast teases East about quake reaction

Aug. 23, 2011 03:48 PM

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO - On the East Coast, people tweeted and Facebooked with expressions of surprise, worry and sometimes panic over the most powerful earthquake to hit them in decades.

The magnitude 5.8 quake, centered outside Richmond, Va., was felt across office buildings and sidewalks along the Eastern Seaboard - in places more accustomed to snowstorms than earthly rumblings. Buildings were evacuated. News networks shook off the August lull.

On Facebook, Twitter and even Google's fledging Plus network, people asked Tuesday if it was really an earthquake they just felt or perhaps Godzilla paying a visit. For many, it was the first quake they ever experienced.

Their West Coast peers, more used to such rumblings, promptly started making fun of them.

"Really all this excitement over a 5.8 quake??? Come on East Coast, we have those for breakfast out here!!!!" wrote Dennis Miller, 50, a lifelong California resident whose house in Pleasanton sits on an earthquake fault line. He said he's had a number of people click "like" on his post on Facebook - all of them from the West Coast, though.

"I haven't heard from anyone on the East Coast because they are probably still sitting under their kitchen tables," Miller said in an interview, with a laugh.

Miller added, "I wouldn't even wake up to a 5.8 if I was asleep." [ Yea, when I was living in El Segundo, I slept thru a 5.0 quake that hit Santa Monica, which is about 5 or 6 miles north of El Segundo. ]

On Twitter and Facebook and over email, people circulated a photo in a serene garden setting, with a table and four plastic lawn chairs. One of the chairs flipped on its back. The mock image carried the title "DC Earthquake Devastation."

Even East Coasters seemed to understand. Joanne Razo, a legal assistant who lives in Washington D.C., has lived through an earthquake in Los Angeles and said she knows that a 5.8 quake is mild by West Coast standards. But for her, the scary part was not the ground shaking but that "this area is not equipped to handle anything like this."

As with the earthquake in Japan earlier this year, many people first heard about the events on the East Coast through social networks.

Stellamarie Hall, who works for a marketing agency in San Francisco, suddenly saw her Facebook page explode with, as she put it, "East Coast people freaking out." Her company's East Coast office, meanwhile, sent out a companywide alert that travel might be affected.

"We were laughing but we definitely understand that New York and certain metropolitan areas are not designed around earthquakes," said Hall, 26.

Hall, who was born and raised in San Francisco, has lived through several earthquakes, big ones like the 1989 Loma Pierta quake that killed dozens of people and small ones that happen several times a year.

"We're accustomed to rumblings," she said.

Of course, the tables might just turn if a freak snowstorm ever hits San Francisco.


Source

East Coast rocked by strongest quake since 1944

Aug. 23, 2011 05:15 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The most powerful earthquake to strike the East Coast in 67 years shook buildings and rattled nerves from Georgia to Maine on Tuesday. Frightened office workers spilled into the streets in New York, and parts of the White House, Capitol and Pentagon were evacuated.

There were no reports of deaths or serious injuries.

The National Cathedral said its central tower and three of its four corner spires were damaged, but the White House said advisers had told President Barack Obama there were no reports of major damage to the nation's infrastructure, including airports and nuclear facilities.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake registered magnitude 5.8 and was centered 90 miles southwest of Washington. It was mild by West Coast standards, but the East Coast is not used to quakes of any size, and this one briefly raised fears of a terror attack less than three weeks before the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.

"I thought I was having maybe a heart attack, and I saw everybody running," said Adrian Ollivierre, an accountant who was in his office on the 60th floor of the Empire State Building when the shaking began. "I think what it is, is the paranoia that happens from 9/11, and that's why I'm still out here -- because, I'm sorry, I'm not playing with my life."

Two nuclear reactors at the North Anna Power Station, in the same county as the epicenter, were automatically taken off line by safety systems, said Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At the Pentagon, a low rumbling built until the building itself was shaking, and people ran into the corridors of the complex. The shaking continued there, to shouts of "Evacuate! Evacuate!" The main damage to the building, the largest single workspace for the federal government, came from a broken water pipe.

The Park Service closed all monuments and memorials on the National Mall, and ceiling tiles fell at Reagan National Airport outside Washington. Many nonessential workers in Washington were sent home for the day. The Capitol was reopened by late afternoon for people to retrieve their things.

The National Cathedral said cracks had appeared in the flying buttresses around the apse at one end. "Everyone here is safe," the cathedral said on its official Twitter feed. "Please pray for the Cathedral as there has been some damage."

In lower Manhattan, the 26-story federal courthouse, blocks from ground zero of the Sept. 11 attacks, began swaying, and hundreds of people streamed out of the building.

The New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was in a meeting with top deputies planning security for the upcoming anniversary when the shaking started. Workers in the Empire State Building spilled into the streets, some having descended dozens of flights of stairs.

"I thought we'd been hit by an airplane," said one worker, Marty Wiesner.

New York District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance was starting a news conference about the dismissal of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, when the shaking began. Reporters and aides began rushing out the door until it became clear it was subsiding.

On Wall Street, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange did not shake, officials said, but the Dow Jones industrial average sank 60 points soon after the quake struck. The Dow began rising again a half-hour later and finished the day up 322 points.

Shaking was felt as far south as Charleston, S.C., as far north as Maine and as far west as Cincinnati and Atlanta. It was also felt on Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, where Obama is taking summer vacation and was starting a round of golf when the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. EDT.

Obama led a conference call Tuesday afternoon on the earthquake with top administration officials, including his homeland security secretary, national security adviser and administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Around Mineral, Va., a small town close to the epicenter, people milled around in their lawns, on sidewalks and parking lots, still rattled and leery of re-entering buildings. All over town, masonry was crumpled, and there were stores with shelved contents strewn on the floor. Several display windows at businesses in the tiny heart of downtown were broken and lay in jagged shards.

Carmen Bonano, who has a 1-year-old granddaughter, sat on the porch of her family's white-frame house, its twin brick chimneys destroyed. Her voice still quavered with fear.

"The fridge came down off the wall and things started falling. I just pushed the refrigerator out of the way, grabbed the baby and ran," she said.

By the standards of the West Coast, where earthquakes are much more common, the Virginia quake was mild. Since 1900, there have been 50 quakes of magnitude 5.8 or greater in California alone. Quakes in the East tend to be felt across a much broader area.

"The waves are able to reverberate and travel pretty happily out for miles," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough.

The Geological Survey put the quake in its yellow alert category, meaning there was potential for local damage but relatively little economic damage.

The agency said the quake was 3.7 miles beneath the surface, but scientists said they may never be able to map the exact fault. Aftershocks may help to outline it, said Rowena Lohman, a seismologist at Cornell University. There were at least two aftershocks, magnitudes 2.2 and 2.8.

The last quake of equal power to strike the East Coast was in New York in 1944. The largest East Coast quake on record was a 7.3 that hit South Carolina in 1886. In 1897, a magnitude-5.9 quake was recorded at Giles County, Va., the largest on record in that state.

A 5.8-magnitude quake releases as much energy as almost eight kilotons of TNT, about half the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The earthquake that devastated Japan earlier this year released more than 60,000 times as much energy as Tuesday's.

The Virginia quake came a day after an earthquake in Colorado toppled groceries off shelves and caused minor damage to homes in the southern part of the state and in northern New Mexico. No injuries were reported as aftershocks continued Tuesday.

On the East Coast, Amtrak said its trains along the Northeast Corridor between Baltimore and Washington were operating at reduced speeds and crews were inspecting stations and railroad infrastructure before returning to normal.

In Charleston, W.Va., hundreds of workers left the state Capitol building and employees at other downtown office buildings were asked to leave temporarily.

"The whole building shook," said Jennifer Bundy, a spokeswoman for the state Supreme Court. "You could feel two different shakes. Everybody just kind of came out on their own."

In Ohio, office buildings swayed in Columbus and Cincinnati, and the press box at Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians, shook. At least one building near the Statehouse was evacuated in downtown Columbus.

In downtown Baltimore, the quake sent office workers into the streets, where lamp posts swayed slightly as they called family and friends to check in.

John Gurlach, air traffic controller at the Morgantown Municipal Airport in West Virginia, was in a 40-foot-tall tower when the earth trembled.

"There were two of us looking at each other saying, 'What's that?'" he said, even as a commuter plane was landing. "It was noticeably shaking. It felt like a B-52 unloading."

Immediately, the phone rang from the nearest airport in Clarksburg, and a computer began spitting out green strips of paper -- alerts from other airports in New York and Washington issuing ground stops "due to earthquake."

The earthquake caused a stir online, where people posted to Facebook and Twitter within seconds and described what they had felt. The keywords in posts, or hashtags, included "DCquake," ''VAquake" and "Columbusquake," an indication of how broadly the quake was experienced.

"People pouring out of buildings and onto the sidewalks and Into Farragut Park in downtown DC," Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, posted on Twitter.

Quake photos and videos also made the rounds. A handful were authentic. Many more were not -- they were favorite earthquake scenes from Hollywood blockbusters or footage of people shaking their glasses and plates at an Olive Garden.


Source

A weird day for earthquakes in the U.S., but that's, um, normal

August 24, 2011 | 4:00 am

Lost in the hullabaloo about the 5.8 quake in Virginia on Tuesday was the fact that there were about 90 other earthquakes across the United States that same day, including a 5.3 quake in Colorado.

Of course, only a few of those were detectable by people, and only 12 were above a 3.0 magnitude.

In other words, it was a typical seismologic day -- in terms of sheer numbers of tremors -- in the United States; what was slightly out of the ordinary was the magnitude and location of the earthquakes, said Rafael Abreu, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist, in an interview with The Times.

Virginia's earthquake was of rare strength for the area. Colorado's quake was one of nine earthquakes in that state on Tuesday, including the 5.3 jolt about 7 miles from Cokedale.

Not to be forgotten: Upstate New York was shaken a bit by a 2.2 quake early Tuesday near Altamont. Jones, Okla., got a 2.8 jolt. And Alaska -- well, Alaska gets a few earthquakes just about every day.

But not to worry, most of the earthquakes were unrelated -- not a part of some grander doomsday equation.

"The fact that they occurred together is purely a coincidence," Abreu said.

The fact that upstate New York's shake occurred only hours before Virginia's doesn't mean the events are connected.

"There is no geological relation," Abreu said.

As for Colorado, it's been having a rash of quakes over the past few days; on Monday, the state was hit with a 4.6 quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But all in all, it still made for an unusual day at work for Abreu.

"It was a strange day," he said. "But Mother Nature teaches us something new every single day."


Source

Earthquake may be strongest in central Virginia history

August 23, 2011 | 2:37 pm

The U.S. Geological survey said the 5.8- magnitude earthquake centered near Richmond could be the strongest ever to hit central Virginia, where temblors of that strength are rare.

"It's an unusually large event for the eastern U.S.," said Ken Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena. "There have been earthquakes in the area before, but not this large."

About 200 earthquakes have been recorded in the area since 1977, but none as strong as Tuesday's, he told The Times.

Previously, the largest earthquake recorded in the area, known to seismologists as the Central Virginia Seismic Zone, was a 4.8-magnitude quake that occurred outside Richmond in 1875, according to a 2006 publication by the USGS. The largest in the state's history was a 5.9-magnitude quake that hit western Virginia's Giles County, near the border with West Virginia in 1897. Smaller earthquakes that cause little or no damage are felt each year or two.

Although earthquakes are much less common on the East Coast than in California, differences in the Earth's crust mean that in the eastern U.S., shaking can be felt in an area about 10 times as wide, the USGS report said. A magnitude 5.5 earthquake in the eastern U.S. usually can be felt as far as 300 miles from its origin and sometimes causes damage in a 25-mile radius

The largest earthquake recorded in the wider region was the 1886 Charleston, S.C., earthquake, with a magnitude of 6.6 or more. That was felt as far north as Canada, as far west as Missouri, and as far south as Cuba.

At one point, Tuesday's earthquake was reported by the USGS to be a 5.9 magnitude earthquake. That was later revised to a 5.8 magnitude earthquake.


Source

East Coast earthquake's epicenter near a nuclear plant

August 23, 2011 | 4:25 pm

Click here to see more photos from the earthquake. The magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook the East Coast on Tuesday was centered near a nuclear power plant, raising concerns that the facility could have been damaged.

North Anna Power Station, located about 10 miles from the epicenter, is running its safety systems on backup generators after the quake knocked out the plant’s outside power source.

David McIntyre, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the two reactors at the plant stopped generating power automatically after the quake.

Four diesel generators began backup operation immediately to support the plant’s safety system, he said. A couple hours after the quake, one of the diesel generators broke down.

“Three are still going,” McIntyre said at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, and there is no indication of a problem at the plant or any of the other 10 plants on the East Coast.

McIntyre said the NRC was closely monitoring the situation at the plant, which is owned by Dominion Power. An NRC resident inspector has been working with power company officials to inspect the facility and its complex systems for any cracks or other damage. So far, he said no damage had been found.

The quake hit along a fault in the Appalachian Mountains that has seen modest seismic activity in the past.

The North Anna plant reported an “alert” after the quake struck. An alert is the second most serious of four status positions for a nuclear plant.

The other 10 plants on the East Coast are listed in the least serious stage of warning, reporting an “unusual event,” and are generating electricity and operating normally, McIntyre said. An unusual event triggers an immediate inspection for cracks, he said.

The North Anna plant was designed to withstand a 5.9 to 6.1 quake.

The quake came “uncomfortably close” to that maximum, said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that advocates stronger regulation of nuclear power.

“We may be off the hook this time, but it was such a close call that we need to move quicker on reviewing all our nuclear plants,” Lyman said.

“When you have a malfunctioning backup generator, it’s something you need to be concerned about," said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former assistant Energy secretary during the Clinton administration. “It’s something that isn’t necessarily going to lead to any serious problem, but those kinds of things should not be happening.”

The North Anna plant has accumulated one of the largest concentrations of radioactivity in the U.S., Alvarez said, and the plant’s spent fuel pools contain “four to five times more than their original designs intended.”

McIntyre said the NRC had “confidence” in the plant’s “dry cask” system for containing spent fuel.

“These casks are robust and strong and have an excellence performance record,” he said.


Source

In Mineral, Va., Sudden Fame at Earthquake’s Epicenter

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Published: August 24, 2011

MINERAL, Va. — More than 100 years before the earth started shaking here on Tuesday, it was the earth — or, more precisely, what the town’s fathers found in it — that put Mineral on the map. Multimedia

This crossroads in central Virginia was Tolersville then. But the discovery of pyrite, sulfur, lead and other minerals turned it into a booming little town, and by 1902 it was incorporated and named after the only thing anybody knew it for.

It got a new distinction just before 2 p.m. on Tuesday when an earthquake rattled the East Coast, and suddenly television screens all over the world were broadcasting a map of Virginia, with Mineral at the center.

“It’s a small town. It’s a pretty tough town; the mining and all,” said Edwin Keller, 60, who grew up in Mineral, was mayor for 12 years and is also a former fire chief for the town. “But real friendly and good people.”

Mr. Keller sat Tuesday evening in his home just off Main Street, fresh cracks running down his walls and pieces of his chimney sitting on his freshly cut lawn. He was in nearby Charlottesville when the quake struck, and he rushed home to assess the damage.

He did not have to look far. Up and down the coast, the quake mostly shook nerves. But here at the epicenter, many of the town’s aging buildings were severely damaged.

On Main Street, the small red-brick post office was quickly shuttered after the facade crumbled on one side and cracks appeared inside all over the walls and ceiling. A few doors down, the floors of the home of Ginger and Charles Gittman were covered with glass and porcelain. Mrs. Gittman, 54, said the broken items included china that had been her grandmother’s.

Mike Leman, the co-owner of Main Street Electrical and Plumbing, was in the back weeding around a propane tank when the ground shook. “The whole tank lifted up and then came back down,” Mr. Leman recalled.

A Philadelphia native, Mr. Leman moved here to start the plumbing business and now calls it his “hometown.” He said his mother in Syracuse, N.Y., called him Tuesday after seeing the town on television.

“When you come to Mineral, if you blink, you went through the town,” Mr. Leman said, laughing. “We were excited that we just got our first traffic light. When people come here from out of town, people say there’s nothing here.”

That’s not literally true. Mr. Keller says there are about 450 people living in Mineral proper. (Don’t mention the people with Mineral addresses over in the nearby Lake Anna area. “They want to be Mineral,” Mr. Keller said. “But I will fight that.”)

As far as town features go, there’s the post office, the church, the water tower and the fire station. There are also a bunch of businesses along Main Street, including Mr. Leman’s plumbing and electrical store, and three schools.

But the mining glory days are long gone, Mr. Keller says. The heyday of the shaft mining that made Mineral famous ended in the 1920s, when strip mining for the same minerals in Louisiana began to provide a cheaper, faster option. Suddenly, the C & O train depot where Mr. Keller’s grandfather worked was not so popular anymore.

Recently, the town, like most places, has been affected by the sluggish economy. But residents are trying to spruce up the place. Last week, the town’s elders broke ground for the new town office. And Mineral recently annexed a bit of property from the surrounding Louisa County — the better to attract commercial development.

“Hopefully, those things will help,” Mr. Keller said.

What will not help much is the earthquake. Despite the publicity, the town faced the problems that inevitably follow these kinds of natural disasters.

Mr. Leman said he had already been informed by his insurance company that his damage was not covered because he did not pay for a separate earthquake rider. Never mind that there has not been a serious earthquake in the town since before it was named Mineral.

The post office was likely to remain closed on Wednesday. The North Anna Power Station — a nuclear power plant about eight miles away — was shut down right after the earthquake as a precaution. Residents of Mineral are crossing their fingers.

Steve Osgood, a building inspector for Mineral, said pictures came off the wall at his home. Cracks appeared in the walls and ceilings. Clothes in the closets ended up on the floor. His hot water heater moved several inches.

Asked whether he was already very busy, he said, “Yes, I am!”

Bill Towsey, 62, the owner of Tractor Hill Equipment, said the earthquake moved his entire building, a 60-by-150-foot metal structure. The power went out for a while.

“Yeah, it was scary,” he said.

Residents of Mineral are trying to calm their nerves. But that wasn’t easy Tuesday evening as aftershocks continued to rock the town.

Even as Mr. Keller was sitting in his den talking to a reporter, an aftershock hit, sending him and his guests scurrying for a doorway. The short quake was nowhere near as strong as the first one, but definitely not something one could ignore.

As he stood in the archway between his den and the hallway, he asked, “How long do these things last?”

Geologists say the aftershocks could continue for months. Mineral’s new fame is likely to last only 15 minutes.


Source

Above All Else, Eastern Quake Rattles Nerves

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: August 24, 2011

The Washington Monument and several other buildings in the nation’s capital remained closed Wednesday morning as engineers checked for structural problems after an earthquake on Tuesday that caused little damage but shook nerves along much of the East Coast.

People evacuated a courthouse in Manhattan on Tuesday after the ripples of an earthquake in Virginia swept up the coast.

The unusual earthquake, centered near the tiny town of Mineral, Va., startled millions of people from Maine to Georgia and disrupted life in some of the nation’s biggest population centers.

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from office buildings. Cellphone service was strangled as the quake led to disruptions in air traffic, halted trains, jammed roadways and gave some on the West Coast an opportunity to poke fun at Easterners who seemed panicked and uncertain of how to respond. In earthquake-prone areas, people usually are instructed to stay inside to avoid falling debris, but in places where earthquakes are unfamiliar — and in a post-Sept. 11 environment — few argued with evacuation commands.

The United States Geological Survey said the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. It preliminarily measured 5.8 and lasted 20 to 30 seconds. Survey officials reported two small aftershocks, of magnitude 2.8 and 2.2, within 90 minutes of the original jolt. Seismologists, suggesting little cause for further alarm, said the initial quake erupted from an old fault, which, unlike the San Andreas fault in California, normally produces much weaker results.

This quake was notable for its incongruity: it was one of the most powerful to hit the East Coast in decades, and yet it caused little damage. Reports of tremors came from as far north as Sudbury, Ontario, where government offices were closed, and as far south as Alabama.

Thousands of people in Midtown Manhattan were evacuated from their offices and found themselves suddenly sprung on a sunny summer afternoon. Farther downtown, police officers ordered the evacuation of City Hall, sending Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his staff scurrying out of the building.

But for all the disruptions and the fleeing of buildings, the quake was, for most people, a curious interruption before life quickly returned to normal. For some it provoked little more than amusement. “Felt a litle wobble here is Astoria, but none of my Scotch fell off the shelf,” a man who identified himself as William Schroeder posted on nytimes.com.

Others were more shaken. “I ran outdoors and found my neighbor calling a friend in Virginia who also felt the profound quake,” Bill Parks of Hummelstown, Pa., said in an e-mail. “This quake was like none I ever experienced in the East in my life and I am 76 years old.”

In Washington, the quake led to quick evacuations of the White House, the Capitol and monuments across the Mall. Some airplanes were left in a temporary hold pattern, and some were diverted to other airports. Amtrak stopped its trains. The Federal Emergency Management Agency asked the public to refrain from talking on cellphones and to use e-mail and text messages instead to relieve the congestion. The epicenter in Mineral is about 84 miles southwest of Washington, and a few miles from a nuclear power plant. Dominion Virginia Power, which owns the plant, said that its units tripped off line automatically as planned and that no damage to the plant had been reported.

Perhaps the most trauma occurred in Mineral itself. The quake stopped everything for hours. Schools closed. Coffee shops shut down. At the Food Lion, on the outskirts, managers shooed reporters away but not before one employee said: “The whole floor was going up and down. It was crazy in there.”

Ben Pirolli, 68, a co-owner of Main Street Plumbing and Electrical, said he was working in the bathroom when the quake hit.

“I was mopping the floor and the next thing you know, everything is falling in on me,” Mr. Pirolli said. “I thought the world was coming to an end.”

Geologists said that the region experiences frequent earthquakes but that they were usually so small that they were hardly noticed. This one was 3.7 miles deep, bigger than is typical, and produced a rumbling that grabbed the attention of millions of people hundreds of miles from the epicenter.

W. Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator, said in an interview that the agency had spoken with emergency coordinators in states across the Atlantic Seaboard, and that so far there were no reports of injuries or major damage and no requests for federal help.

The lack of major damage was attributable to the geology of the East Coast, Mr. Fugate said. The hard rock transmits the energy of the earthquake longer distances, he said, even if the quake does not cause devastation.

“What we are getting is case by case — a building here, a building there,” he said. “Most of the major things like roads and bridges seem to be intact and O.K.”

One place that reported damage was the landmark National Cathedral in Washington. Several pinnacles in one of the towers cracked or broke off, a security official at the cathedral said. The cathedral’s central tower also appeared to be damaged, and the building is closed to the public until further notice.

The interior of the Washington Monument was also closed on Wednesday. The National Park Service said it was continuing to inspect the structure, though it had already deemed it “structurally sound.”

“The Washington Monument grounds are being reopened except for the plaza and the monument itself,” The Parks Service said on its Web site. “The National Park Service will continue to inspect the interior of the monument before any decisions are made about reopening it to the public.”

Over all, the biggest problem in Washington on Tuesday may have been the giant traffic jams that formed as tens of thousands of workers left the city after the tremor. Tourists, with nowhere else to go, packed the streets. Debris had fallen from a few buildings, city officials said.

Rumbles were reported to The New York Times from places as far-flung as South Carolina, Pittsburgh and Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama was on vacation and unaffected. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in Japan, coincidentally checking out damage from that nation’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake in March.

Tuesday’s quake was also felt through a large part of eastern Canada, including Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that it extended as far north as the mining city of Sudbury.

Arthur Lerner-Lam, head of the Lamont-Doherty Division of Seismology at Columbia University, said the earthquake occurred in a part of central Virginia that is known as an area of geologically old faults, created several hundred million years ago during the formation of the Appalachian Mountains.

That area has frequent small earthquakes; the largest previously recorded there was a magnitude 4.8 in 1875. The last big quake in the East, with a magnitude of 5.8, was in 1944 in Massena, N.Y.

“We do expect earthquakes to occur here,” Dr. Lerner-Lam said. “Not as frequently as in California, but this is not a surprise.”

He described the central Virginia earthquakes as “kind of a randomized reactivation of these geologically old structures,” as opposed to the tremors that occur along an active fault like the San Andreas in California.

In Richmond, Va., Lance Fisk, 46, a tattoo artist, was an hour into applying a tattoo when the building started to shake.

“At first I thought it was a truck bouncing the building, but then it went on and on,” Mr. Fisk said, adding that chairs were rolling around the floor. “The guy in the chair was getting nervous. I told him, ‘Sorry about that crooked line.’ I was just messing with him.”


Source

East Coast quake cracks Washington Monument stone

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The earthquake that shook much of the East Coast cracked one of the stones at the top of the Washington Monument, a National Park Service spokesman said on Wednesday.

The huge obelisk, a prime tourist attraction on the U.S. capital's central Mall, was evacuated soon after the quake was felt around 1:51 p.m. EDT on Tuesday.

The crack in one of the stones in the monument's pyramidium -- the pyramid shape at the very top -- was detected during an inspection by helicopter, spokesman Bill Line said.

Structural engineers are expected to make further assessments on Wednesday. The monument remains closed until further notice, Line said.

Public schools in the District of Columbia were closed on Wednesday as officials make safety assessments of the 126 school buildings, city officials said in a statement.


Source

Marylanders rattled by the unexpected

Rare in these parts, quake arrived in mystery, left behind tales

By Jean Marbella, The Baltimore Sun

10:58 a.m. EDT, August 24, 2011

It must have been the construction site across the street. Or maybe it was a tractor-trailer lumbering by, a train rumbling underground or even a pesky friend shaking one's beach chair.

Everything, that is, but what it actually was: an earthquake, so rare in these parts that when one emptied offices and homes, shook merchandise off store shelves and roused lazing sunbathers on Tuesday afternoon, it wasn't the first explanation that popped into many people's heads.

"Who would have thought there would be an earthquake in Baltimore?" asked Zinda Morris, 22, a member of a city Circuit Court jury pool.

With little serious damage reported, the earthquake in the Baltimore area was an initially unnerving experience that turned out to be more of a summer weekday distraction, a ready-made talking point for strangers thrown together on a sidewalk.

In today's climate, thoughts of a terrorist attack crossed more than a few minds as buildings started rocking, but just as quickly such fears proved unwarranted. Story after story began with an eye-widening, "I thought it was …" only to end in a shrug-inducing denouement.

"My house shook from side to side, and pots and pans rattled on the racks in the kitchen. I thought my flatscreen was going to rock off the counter," said James Gordon of Baltimore, vacationing in his townhouse in Rehoboth Beach. "But it did not."

It didn't take long — less than an hour, actually — for the Power Plant Live entertainment complex in the Inner Harbor to start promoting "Tremor Tuesday" drink specials.

The earth's shaking didn't rattle as much as confuse. Linda Jackson, driving from her West Baltimore home to her job as an environmental services worker at Mercy Medical Center, thought her minivan was having some sort of breakdown.

"It shook and shook," Jackson said. "I didn't have a clue what was happening. I thought my transmission was going up."

Once she got to work, she saw her co-workers on the sidewalk outside the downtown hospital, prompting misconception No. 2.

"I thought there had been a bomb threat," she said.

In Harbor East, the namesake products at Handbags in the City began falling off shelves and lights started flickering as Bree McNerney sat behind the register, mystified. As the trembling intensified, though, she bolted.

"I was out the front door," the 22-year-old said.

Along Frederick Road, the main drag in Catonsville, people spilled out onto the sidewalk to figure out what had happened. Pete Kriscumas, legislative assistant to Baltimore County Councilman Tom Quirk, was in a car parked behind the district office when the shaking started.

"It was really rocking," he said, as if someone was bouncing the back of the car.

"We looked in the [rearview] mirror," Kriscumas said, "but there was nobody there."

Similarly in Rehoboth, Michael Cormier of New York City suspected mischief as his chair "rocked back and forth" as well.

"I thought someone had come up from behind and was shaking it," he said.

But who? Maybe theelephants could have told him.

At the Maryland Zoo, general curator Mike McClure said the four Africanelephants must have picked up infrasound waves, which are lower in frequency than a human can hear and are believed to serve as early warning signals that earthquakes, tsunamis or other natural disasters are approaching.

The three females and the 3-year-old calf Samson "put their butts together, wrapped their trunks together and made a big ball of elephant," he said.

But the polarbears, coolly enough, slept soundly in the 2,000 pounds of snow brought in for a "Beat the Heat" event, McClure said.

That was what drew David Silver ofTowson and his family to the zoo Tuesday, and they were delighted to get an extra attraction as well.

"We got to see the polarbears, have free ice cream, and then we got a free earthquake," Silver said. "That's some entertainment they've got there."

The bears weren't the only beings oblivious to the quake.

Three window washers, suspended by ropes high above the ground, squeegee-d away at Mercy Medical Center's panes of glass even as crowds evacuated buildings around them. Drivers on the Orleans Street bridge over Calvert Street even rolled down their windows to alert them to the earthquake, to no avail.

"I thought they were messing with us," said Eric Ruhl, when he and his co-workers finally propelled themselves down to the ground at about 3 p.m., having finished a bank of windows.

None of the three workers for PSI of Harrisburg, Pa., hired to wash the windows, had any idea there really was a quake down below — perhaps, as Ruhl speculated, because their ropes stretch and have a lot of "give and bounce."

"Now that is scary," Adam Thomas said in hindsight.

"It was kind of funny, I saw everyone standing on the street," Michael DeJesus said, remembering that he thought it was just a late lunch crowd.

Even on the ground, there were those who missed all the excitement.

"Everyone was calling me, asking if the crystal was OK," said Tasha Dutton, a salesclerk at the Swarovski store in the Gallery at Harborplace.

With champagne flutes and crystals carved into tropical fish glittering in the window and the chandelier's dangling spheres all still, she had no idea there had been an earthquake until a district manager called.

"I felt nothing," said Dutton. "It was so strange."

In Washington, the earthquake complicated commuting: Some traffic lights were knocked out, jamming up streets. Bus stops, Metro platforms and MARC train stations became crowded as the earthquake interrupted usual schedules.

Sherrice Flowers, a Baltimore resident who works in a law firm near McPherson Square, said she walked to Union Station and was able to get a ticket home easily, but she was standing in a packed waiting area and it was not clear when her Penn line train would leave.

She was sitting in her second-story office eating lunch when the quake hit.

"I felt the building just shaking, shaking, shaking. I have a window that looks out on the lobby. I looked out and saw people running out of my building. We ran out of the building and ran into the park."

At Union Station, Maryland commuters were lined up waiting for a MARC train. Though the electronic screens declared that the trains were running on time, an announcer said MARC was short of trains and crews and pleaded for patience.

Dominique Tillman, a 27-year-old staffer on Capitol Hill, was also waiting in line to board the Penn line to Baltimore. Tillman, though, took the quake-induced delay in stride, a price that had to be paid for an unusual experience.

"I bought a ticket, got a bite to eat, sat and waited," he said. "I would hope that people recognize that today's an interesting day."

Baltimore Sun reporters John Fritze, Erica Green, Arthur Hirsch, Jacques Kelly, Erik Maza, Lorraine Mirabella, Julie Scharper, Andrea K. Walker contributed to this article.

jean.marbella@baltsun.com

Source

Scott Calvert and Childs Walker, The Baltimore Sun

11:12 p.m. EDT, August 23, 2011

A frightening earthquake jolted Baltimore and much of the East Coast on Tuesday, shaking buildings and rattling nerves. Thousands of people streamed from offices and homes into the afternoon sunshine, stunned by a phenomenon more commonly associated with seismic hot spots like California and Japan.

Area officials reported that the quake caused only pockets of significant damage, and there were no known deaths or serious injuries, locally or nationwide. But the sense of alarm was widespread as mystified residents jammed phone networks trying to reach loved ones and officials scrambled to assess the fallout.

And humans weren't the only ones feeling anxiety: Vibration-sensitive elephants at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore reacted by linking trunks and clustering together.

After the ground shook for several seconds, buildings were evacuated, pushing workers into the streets, and some businesses and agencies shut down for the afternoon. Rail travel was interrupted, and many commuters faced an early, congested rush hour.

Building inspectors quickly fanned out in Baltimore and around the state to check for structural damage, and authorities urged homeowners to look for foundation cracks and other signs of the quake's effects.

The U.S. Geological Survey gave the quake a preliminary magnitude of 5.8, making it one of the strongest on record for Virginia, and one of the strongest ever felt in Maryland.

The quake, centered 35 miles northwest ofRichmond, was felt from theGeorgia to Canada. It struck at 1:51 p.m. The geological survey reported several aftershocks.

While smaller temblors are hardly unheard of in the region, most go unnoticed. Jeffrey Halka, at the Maryland Geological Survey, said the state typically gets two a year that people can feel. Tuesday's was among the few times anyone now alive has ever felt the ground in Baltimore shake that violently.

The thought of an earthquake did not even initially occur to many. Some at first feared terrorism, while others jumped to more mundane conclusions. Chanel Jenkins figured she was just having mechanical trouble when her car began shaking as she hunted for parking downtown.

"I just had work on the car, so I was a little annoyed," said Jenkins, a day care provider and nurse. She was astounded when she saw people pouring out of buildings as she was driving in downtown Baltimore. "I couldn't figure out what happened," she said.

Some workers in Baltimore's World Trade Center said when the waterfront tower began to rock, they feared the worst. "The windows were buckling," said Deborah Harris, who works on the 10th floor. "My first thought was 9/11 and the fact that we work in the World Trade Center."

"Everybody hurried to get to the stairwell. We didn't know what had happened," said Deborah Hawkins-Epps, an administrative assistant who was in her seventh-floor office.

Others missed the excitement altogether. "We didn't feel a thing," said Tennessee resident Sarah Vos, who was inside The Gallery mall downtown at the time with her husband and their two children.

In Baltimore, the earthquake badly damaged the steeple and bell tower at St. Patrick Roman Catholic Church in Fells Point. A spokesman for the archdiocese said the church was unsafe to occupy, and he encouraged worshippers to go to nearby Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Highlandtown instead.

Farther east in Highlandtown, the Order of the Sons of Italy building on Gough Street partially collapsed onto an adjacent doctor's office, leaving piles of brick in the front yard.

In Annapolis, where the historic district dates to Colonial times, several old buildings reported possible damage, including loose or fallen bricks, said Rhonda Wardlaw, a city spokeswoman. Plaster fell off the ceiling in parts of the State House.

In theDistrict of Columbia, a pinnacle at the National Cathedral — the highest point in Washington — sustained significant damage, according to cathedral officials.

The National Mall was closed for a time, and workers evacuated the House and Senate office buildings.

Baltimore City officials warned residents at an afternoon news conference to prepare for aftershocks and to exercise caution around damaged buildings.

"If you're walking down the street, watch what's happening above you," counseled Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano. "Don't lean up against buildings."

Elsewhere in the state, there were some reports of damage, though no injuries have been reported, said Edward J. McDonough, spokesman for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency.

Many initial reports of damage turned out to be false. After initial reports of structural problems at Harford Memorial Hospital in Havre de Grace came in, a spokeswoman said an inspection found none. No patients were injured or evacuated. In many areas, the physical effects of the quake appeared minor, given the force of the quake. In Baltimore County, for instance, officials reported no serious damage to any buildings or gas or water lines.

The tremor apparently triggered the collapse of a section of a cliff overlooking theChesapeake Bay in northern Calvert County, but without causing injury or harming property. Jim Parent, town administrator for Chesapeake Beach, said the cliff crumbled just south of a public beach.

The tall bayshore cliffs in Calvert County are continually eroding, Parent pointed out, and it's not unusual for a section to crumble after a big storm.

There were no signs of trouble at nearby nuclear power plants operated by Constellation Energy, including at Calvert Cliffs, spokesman Mark Sullivan said. The liquefied natural gas terminal at Cove Point in southern Calvert County, just three miles from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, also was apparently unaffected by the quake, according to Dan Donovan, spokesman for Dominion Energy, which operates the facility.

No city dams were affected, and there were no reports of water main breaks, said Celeste Amato, a spokeswoman for Baltimore's Department of Public Works.

The twin-reactor Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Delta, Pa. — just across the Maryland line from Harford County and 45 miles north of Baltimore — suffered no damage and continued running at full power, said David Tillman, spokesman for its owner, Exelon Corp. But as a precaution, the company declared "an unusual event" — the lowest category alert under federal nuclear safety regulations — at Peach Bottom and Exelon's three other nuclear plants in the Mid-Atlantic region, including Three Mile Island. Engineers are conducting comprehensive inspections "just to make 100 percent sure," Tillman said.

Afternoon commuters encountered headaches in Baltimore and Washington. Service on MARC trains and light rail was suspended. The Baltimore subway was suspended and then reopened at 3:30 p.m. with speed restrictions. However, planes continued landing atBaltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Both Baltimore circuit courthouses were emptied and the prisoners evacuated using standard emergency protocol, said Capt. Samuel Cogen of the Baltimore sheriff's office. He was using the loudspeaker on a cruiser to control the crowd on the streets and to send employees home early.

"All nonessential personnel are relieved," he said to cheers.

Jurors stood on the island between the courthouses, trading quake stories. Farzin Kermani reached out to his wife, Rita, as soon as he felt the tremor. It took 22 tries on his cellphone to get through, he said. She was at the Barnes and Noble store in North Baltimore, where she said it felt as if the walls were coming down.

A block from the courthouse complex, City Hall employees spilled out on to War Memorial Plaza. Heather Brantner of Arbutus said she and colleagues at the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice just "looked at each other" as the walls shook — until their boss told them to get out.

"This doesn't happen in Maryland," Brantner said.

Some offices and businesses simply shut their doors. More than an hour after the quake, a sign posted on the door at Harbor Bank's West Fayette Street building read: "Emergency Closing due to circumstances beyond our control. Our offices are temporarily closed. Sorry for the inconvenience."

Patti Long, a project manager at the American Office store downtown, was still shaking long after the tremor stopped. This was her first quake, and it "scared the living hell" out of her.

"I wouldn't want to live in a place where this happened all the time," she said.

When the earthquake hit, Michael Fitz-Patrick was on the phone at his Hunt Valley office, talking to a friend about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Ten years ago, Fitz-Patrick was on the 61st floor of Two World Trade Center, the second tower hit. His friend was at a Manhattan coffee shop not far from Ground Zero.

"As we're sharing the story," Fitz-Patrick said Tuesday afternoon, "the building started to shake."

"Do you feel that?" asked his friend, sitting at his own office in North Baltimore.

Yes, Fitz-Patrick replied. Then he said, "Dude, I'm outta here."

Baltimore Sun reporters Tricia Bishop, Michael Dresser, Justin Fenton, John Fritze, Erica L. Green, Arthur Hirsch, Annie Linskey, Lorraine Mirabella, Frank D. Roylance, Julie Scharper, Andrea Siegel, Andrea K. Walker and Timothy B. Wheeler contributed to this article.

scott.calvert@baltsun.com

childs.walker@baltsun.com

Source

August 24, 2011

Baltimore's first earthquake tweet

We all know by now that social media, specifically networks such as Twitter and Facebook, played a big role in connecting people after yesterday's earthquake. [Note:Did you see my story about it?]

Well, the folks at Twitter sifted through all those messages yesterday and then emailed me with some interesting facts, including Baltimore's first earthquake tweet.

The tweet came from Verna-Catherine (@prettyinbluee_) Her first tweet was "Earthquake?" (see above)

At first, as you see by her tweets, she thought someone was breaking into her house. Then, she grabbed her dog and her TV.

Here's the tweeter -- she's fast with her texting. Someone in the media should think about hiring her!

My favorite tweet of hers: "People just happy that something interesting happened in MD."

Some other earthquake facts from Twitter, courtesy of PR person Jodi Olson:

* A Tweet can reach your followers in less than a second. So in areas far from the epicenter, some people read Tweets about the quake before they felt it.

* Within a minute of the earthquake, there were more than 40,000 earthquake-related Tweets.

* Twitter hit about 5,500 Tweets per second (TPS). For context, this TPS is more than Osama Bin Laden's death & on par with the Japanese quake.

Source

3 federal buildings, 2 school districts closed today

St. Patrick's closed for at least through September due to quake damage; shuttle to take members to Highlandtown church

By Liz F. Kay, The Baltimore Sun

11:53 a.m. EDT, August 24, 2011

Inspections of highway, toll and school facilities in some counties in Maryland continued Wednesday morning after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake struck in Virginia, causing tremors felt from Georgia to Canada.

Three federal buildings in Maryland were closed Wednesday pending further inspections: the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Bethesda; the Department of Health and Human Services in Laurel; and the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

In Baltimore, Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien surveyed damage to St. Patrick's Church in Fells Point Wednesday morning, where Broadway was closed between Gough and Bank streets as a result of the fall hazard.

Archdiocese officials decided to cancel services at least through September and will provide a shuttle to Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Highlandtown. Mass is usually celebrated at the damaged church Sunday mornings as well as Wednesday nights.

"I think everyone knows we don't want to take any chances," O'Brien said after he discussed the damage with the Rev. Robert Wojtek, pastor of St. Patrick's.

Cecil County school systems postponed its first day of school to permit further inspections of school buildings. Prince George's County also canceled classes Wednesday.

The University of Maryland's McKeldin Library was closed Wednesday while staff replaced books that had fallen off shelves, according to the university website. The architecture library was not expected to open before noon Wednesday.

Teams working overnight discovered no damage in Maryland's bridges and tunnels but will continue to check facilities throughout Wednesday, spokeswomen for the State Highway Administration and Maryland Transportation Authority said.

MdTA inspectors will suspend work through the morning rush, but hope to finish today, spokeswoman Cheryl Sparks said.

SHA inspectors will be working for several days to inspect facilities. Both SHA and MdTA warned that motorists could encounter some traffic delays and temporary lane closures as a result of the inspections.

"Now we're just taking a closer look at some of those bridges and structures that were closest to the epicenter of the earthquake" as well as others that might have been deemed susceptible to an earthquake, said Lora Rakowski, an SHA spokeswoman.

The agency said one of the bridges that will receive extra attention is the Thomas Johnson Bridge that carries Route 4 over the Patuxent River between Calvert and St. Mary's counties.

The bridge, one of the state's longest, will undergo inspections Wednesday and Thursday. Crews will alternate eastbound and westbound traffic to give inspectors room to work safely. Flagging operations will be in effect between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. both days.

The agency said structural engineers will inspect the 34-year-old bridge using a large crane with a bucket on an arm extending over the side and under the bridge. Officials said a truck will have to be parked in one lane of the bridge to permit a safe inspection.

No further damage was reported from the cliffs of Calvert County, according to spokesman Mark Vollard. However, any business owners there that discovered damage to buildings was encouraged to report it. They may be eligible for emergency loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, regardless of size, he said.

Standing outside St. Patrick's in Fells Point, O'Brien said it is the archdiocese's oldest parish community. The church building dates back to 1898, with Irish immigrants, and now serves a predominantly Latino population. It is "one that has been serving people well," he said.

"I think it's got a lot more years to serve people," O'Brien added. Nolan McCoy, the archdiocese's director of facilities and real estate, said stabilizing the steeple is a priority, so Broadway can be reopened. "We're concerned about the structural stability of the entire structure," he said.

The shuttles will pick up passengers in St. Patrick's parking lot about 15 minutes before services begin and bring them back afterward, McCoy said.

Wotjek said for those who work weekends, the weekly Wednesday night services are often the only one they can attend. "For some, Wednesday Mass is their Sunday," he said.

Two other churches reported minor damage to chimneys: St. Clement Mary Hofbauer in Rosedale and Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Middle River.

Baltimore Sun reporter Michael Dresser contributed to this article.

liz.kay@baltsun.com

Source

Rare Strong Earthquake Hits Colorado

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: August 23, 2011

DENVER — The largest natural earthquake in Colorado in more than a century struck Monday night in the state’s southeast corner, but there were no reports of damage or injuries.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 5.3, was centered about nine miles from the city of Trinidad and hit at 11:46 p.m. local time. It was felt as far away as Greeley, about 350 miles north, and into Kansas and New Mexico, said Julie Dutton, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

Colorado, with its mix of mountains and plains, sits astride a seismically stable part of the nation where earthquakes are mostly mild and far between. But the area around Trinidad is regularly hit by tiny quakes as a result of a local fault zone, Ms. Dutton said.

She said that while Colorado had experienced several earthquakes close to Monday’s size in recent decades — a magnitude 5.3 near Denver in 1967 and a magnitude 5.7 in the state’s northwest corner in 1973 — both of those quakes were ultimately determined to have been caused by human activity, from explosives or drilling.

The last known natural event of comparable size was an earthquake in 1882 in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park. That quake, based on historical reports, was about a magnitude 6.5, Ms. Dutton said.

Source

5.8-magnitude quake shakes central Virginia, East Coast

By: STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

Published: August 23, 2011

One of the most powerful earthquakes in Virginia history rippled from its epicenter in Louisa County throughout the eastern United States but injured few people and caused little major structural damage.

The 15-second tremor measured 5.8 on the Richter scale Tuesday at 1:51 p.m., prompting buildings to empty, cellphone service to go silent and two nuclear reactors near the center of the quake to shut down without damage.

Six students and at least one staff member at Louisa County High School were injured in the quake, but only one was hospitalized.

"The very good news is that the damage and the injuries that have been reported are very, very minor," Gov. Bob McDonnell said in a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

In downtown Richmond, three elderly residents of Fay Towers, a high-rise apartment building were hospitalized for medical conditions and a dozen more examined at the scene after they were evacuated, but no one was injured. The 200 residents were allowed to return to their apartments last night.

A local emergency was declared in Louisa, where the quake began almost 5 miles from the town of Mineral, and where property damage was most pronounced.

"That was quite a jolt," said Nancy Loveless, who lives in Goochland County near the Louisa line and lost power briefly.

A 4.2-magnitude aftershock quake centered in Mineral rumbled through central Virginia at 8:04 p.m., one of three aftershocks Tuesday evening. Quakes measuring 2.8 and 2.2 hit at 6:46 p.m. and 7:20 p.m., respectively.

"Aftershocks could continue for days. They are to be expected," said Chester "Skip" Watts, a Radford University engineering geologist. "The first earthquake loosened things up but didn't quite relieve all of the (underground) stress."

The earthquake disrupted life Tuesday afternoon along the East Coast, causing the federal government to send workers home, members of the White House staff to huddle in a driveway, and the Washington Nationals baseball team to delay the start of a game scheduled Tuesday night.

McDonnell was in his office in the Patrick Henry Building in Capitol Square talking with his son at the University of Virginia when he felt the building begin to shake.

"I asked my son to hang on, and he said, 'Dad, I feel it here, too.' And that's when I knew it was something more than just a local event or something going on with our building," the governor said.

Maryland officials closed the U.S. 301 Harry W. Nice Bridge across the Potomac River for about two hours to inspect it. It was reopened at 4 p.m. The Virginia Department of Transportation was inspecting bridges throughout the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Culpeper regions.

Transportation officials found no damage in the four highway tunnels in the Hampton Roads area or two mountain tunnels on Interstate 77 in Southwest Virginia.

They said the biggest problem they face is manmade. The simultaneous closure of federal offices led to enormous road and rail congestion in Northern Virginia.

Though Richmond International Airport was able to operate normally after the earthquake, the FAA control tower was evacuated as a precaution for less than 10 minutes Tuesday, according to airport spokesman Troy Bell.

Some flights to RIC from northeastern U.S. locations were late Tuesday because of earthquake-related ground delays at their departure airports, Bell said.

The quake occurred as Virginians voted in 16 legislative primaries across the state. The governor said it did not appear that any polling place was inactive for more than 30 minutes.

* * * * *

Locally, the quake led Virginia Commonwealth University to cancel its convocation ceremony for new students at the Landmark Theater and prompted Richmond to close City Hall for the day to ensure its safety.

No injuries or significant damages were reported in localities in the Richmond region, but the quake prompted a flurry of emergency calls in Richmond that mostly proved unfounded.

The biggest initial concern centered on Dominion Virginia Power's North Anna nuclear plant near Mineral, about 40 miles northwest of Richmond. The earthquake knocked out power at the plant, but both nuclear units were shut down without incident and no damage was apparent, Dominion said.

"We did lose on-site power, but all the diesel generators are up and running," Dominion spokesman Richard Zuercher said 30 minutes after the quake. "Everything appears to be operating just fine."

Zuercher said North Anna's operators were preparing to manually shut down the units after the quake when the power station's operating system automatically powered down both units, which supply about 10 percent of the state's electricity.

"Their staff is obviously looking at every inch of that plant," the governor said.

The quake was the biggest in Virginia since May 5, 1897, when a 5.8 tremor began in Giles County and was felt in 12 states.

"It happened so quickly, you didn't really have time to get totally scared. Once we knew what was going on, it had actually stopped," said Sarah Copeland, director of assisted living at Imperial Plaza, a private complex with 1,100 units for the elderly on Bellevue Avenue in Richmond.

Copeland said residents didn't get too frazzled. No one was injured. After the earthquake ended, one elderly resident said, "Well, I'm going upstairs to pray."

William Harper, an employee with the town of Mineral in Louisa County, reported "some building damage" at the municipal offices.

The quake was felt "very strongly" at Montpelier, home of President James Madison in Orange County, about 30 miles from the epicenter, said spokeswoman Peggy Seiter Vaughn. "Luckily, we sustained no major damage … just a few minor cracks in the plaster, and a picture or two knocked off the wall."

In Richmond, officials inspected City Hall and other city facilities, as well as all major bridges, but found no evidence of structural damage by Tuesday evening.

City officials urged building managers of private, high-rise buildings to conduct self-inspections and report any damages. Food Lion, a North Carolina-based grocery chain, closed 25 of its stores in Virginia and Maryland to check for damage.

VCU postponed the new-student convocation so university faculty and staff members could leave early to check their homes for quake damage. The event, at which author Wes Moore was to be the keynote speaker, has not yet been rescheduled.

In Washington, the Russell Senate Office Building swayed when the quake hit, said Kevin Hall, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va. Staff members were evacuated there, and Hall said the tremor also was felt by staff in Abingdon, in Southwest Virginia, and at an event Warner was attending in Culpeper.

Source

5.3 quake in Trinidad, Colo., area unnerves region's residents

By Jordan Steffen

The Denver Post

An unusual swarm of temblors in southern Colorado accompanied the state's strongest earthquake in more than 40 years, shaking bricks and stones loose from buildings and rattling some residents.

"The whole house shook, the bookshelves, the paintings," said Melissa Mestas, a barista at the What'a Grind Coffee House in Trinidad. "It was really scary and just this helpless feeling."

The 5.3-magnitude earthquake hit Monday shortly before midnight about 9 miles southwest of Trinidad. Throughout the night and into Tuesday morning, aftershocks — several measuring at a magnitude of 3 or above — continued to unsettle residents. No injuries were reported.

Tuesday morning, the conversation at the coffee house centered on where everybody was when the earthquake hit, Mestas said. Along with the coffee house, several older historical buildings in Trinidad's downtown had minor damage.

The longtime resident said she is familiar with smaller earthquakes but has never been through one as powerful as Monday night's.

"It's piqued a lot of curiosity as to what's caused this," Mestas said.

Rare, not unheard of

While strong earthquakes and swarms of aftershocks are rare in Colorado, they do have a history in the area, said Gavin Hayes, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden.

Southern Colorado sits over a fault in the tectonic plate, Hayes said. Over time, stress builds as the two sides of the fault rub together. The stress is eventually released in a strong earthquake and followed by several smaller earthquakes known as an earthquake swarm.

Earthquake swarms are rare in Colorado, compared with other states, such as California, that sit on the edge of a tectonic plate.

"At the moment, it just seems like the quake is consistent with the region and the historic activity in the area," Hayes said.

The last comparable earthquake Steve Newman jumps with students as he talks to his seventh-grade science class Tuesday about the seismograph under his classroom floor at Kent Denver School. Research on the quake near Trinidad gave students a close-to-home look at earth science. (AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post) to hit Colorado happened in August 1967, when a magnitude-5.3 earthquake hit in the same area.

Aftershocks following Monday night's quake could continue for weeks, Hayes said.

Road, building checks

Las Animas County Sheriff Jim Casias said Tuesday afternoon that authorities and engineers were completing safety checks on buildings and roads.

The earthquake caused rock slides on Colorado 12 and several county roads. Authorities are worried that heavy rains could cause the loose rocks to wash out without warning, Casias said.

Older homes and buildings in the area are particularly susceptible to damage as aftershocks continue.

"Everybody's just frazzled," Casias said. "It's got a pretty big impact on you and your families."

Ringo's Super Trading Post in Segundo was closed Tuesday after the earthquake shook groceries off shelves and damaged several antiques, said manager Theresa James.

"It's a lot of cracks right now," James said. "The building is still sound, but it has shifted, no doubt."

Segundo is less than 5 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.

While Colorado's quake is similar to one that occurred Tuesday afternoon in Virginia, there is nothing to indicate they were connected, Hayes said.

Students in Steve Newman's seventh-grade science class got a chance at a first-hand look at both earthquakes during their first day of school Tuesday. A student-built seismograph, nestled in a crawl space underneath a classroom at Kent Denver School in Englewood, captured the earthquakes and provided students with this year's first homework assignment — researching the Trinidad earthquake.

"The classroom is plastered with readings from the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan," Newman said. "This will be an impressive introduction to earth science and how it can strike near home."

Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794 or jsteffen@denverpost.com

 


四 川 铁 Home

四 川 铁 Four River Iron