OMG...it would be a nightmare! Unlike out here in CA, those buildings are not built with an Earthquake in mind. If NYC ever gets something on the level of the Loma Prieta, back in 1989, I shudder at the thought.
Ha! Good friends of ours, their house floods practically on the regular since Irene, it's awful. So she texts me floods, an earthquake, and an eclipse. It's all over! We're doomed!
Yesterday morning men came to install vibration sensors on my terrace in preparation for construction work on a Staten Island promenade (similar to the West Side of Lower Manhattan) scheduled to begin soon. When the building began to shake at 10:23 AM, I first thought maybe they were testing the equipment. A text to the super said the guys were already gone. Then I texted a buddy up in Washington Heights to see if he felt anything. When he texted back "Yes", I knew it had to be a quake. I had felt a number of quakes while studying in Mexico including a big one (7.0) in Veracruz. Then I emailed the Lamont-Doherty Observatory at Columbia to confirm and here's the reply which came later in the afternoon: According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, consisting in part of observations from the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismic Network (LCSN), a magnitude M 4.8 earthquake occurred this morning at 10:23 AM (EDT), centered 6 km ESE of Califon, New Jersey. It occurred on a fault within the Ramapo Fault zone, a northeast-to-southwest running fault that separates the Newark Basin from the Hudson Highlands. The magnitude of the earthquake was unusually large but fairly consistent with the type of earthquake that has occurred in this region in the past. The Ramapo Fault and related faults are not located on active plate boundaries, but these faults have been active in the past (most recently several hundred million years ago). Earthquakes like the one today are caused by the accumulation of strain in the crust. Because the rock making up the crust in this part of the U.S. is old and brittle, the energy of the earthquake radiates a great distance, and the event is felt to a much wider extent than an earthquake of similar magnitude in, say, California. Best regards, LDEO Directorate
