A rare 4.8 magnitude East Coast earthquake raises questions about preparedness

Within minutes of the earthquake that hit the Northeast on Friday morning, New York City emergency management officials set out to check the damage, said Jackie Bray, commissioner of the New York State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

Under the state's emergency operations plan, city and state structural engineers were immediately deployed to inspect bridges, tunnels and other key infrastructure, and nuclear plants were required to report any damage within 15 minutes, she said. Bray said they didn't find anything significant.

But experts say it's still worth considering what could go wrong. “These are important teachable moments in terms of what if, what we would do if the situation was worse,” said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

Schlegelmilch, who has authored two books on disaster preparedness, added that earthquakes “are not as highly prioritized as other scenarios on the East Coast and as you might see in more seismically active areas like the West Coast and countries like Japan.” “There are plans in place and planning efforts, but obviously the ones we experience most frequently, such as coastal storms and severe weather events, are usually top of mind.”

Friday's earthquake, whose epicenter was near Lebanon, New Jersey, took the region by surprise. “It's not like a blizzard in Buffalo, right, you know you get that every year,” Bray said. “An unexpected earthquake occurred in New York.”

However, the state and city have put seismic measures in place, including adopting building codes that require new buildings or those that have been significantly renovated “to be built to the appropriate seismic standards,” Bray said, “so it's something we're prepared for when that happens.” “

While New York City and other large urban areas in the Northeast have generally adopted the latest seismic building standards recommended by the American Society of Civil Engineers, such rules are not universal. Emily Guglielmo, who chairs the Engineering Society's earthquake committee that oversees standards for new buildings, noted that countless jurisdictions and localities oversee building regulations and choose which standards to adopt for their communities.

“There are a lot of different models,” Guglielmo said. “But it's fair to say that a larger city is more sophisticated and able to accommodate code changes than a smaller jurisdiction.”

Such criteria are not related to the magnitude of the earthquake, but rather to the “collapse probabilities” — an assessment that varies based on regional earthquake risk standards and attempts to design equal safety standards nationwide, Guglielmo said.

“Obviously the ground motions, the seismic risk, are higher in California than in New York, so we will design for a higher strength in California than we do in New York,” she said.

Although they are less frequent and smaller in magnitude than those on the West Coast, earthquakes tend to be felt on a much larger scale on the East Coast, said Paul Segal, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University. That's because older, cooler rocks below the Earth's surface on the East Coast are less absorbent than warmer rocks to the West, he said.

A 4.8-magnitude earthquake shook the East Coast shortly after 10:20 a.m. Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The 5.8-magnitude Mineral Springs earthquake that struck Virginia in 2011 “was probably felt by more people than any other in U.S. history,” Segal noted.

Although today's earthquake did not cause major damage, Segal said he does not rule out a larger earthquake on the East Coast in the future. “The overall risk there is much lower than in California and the Pacific Northwest, but it is not zero.”

New York City and other East Coast cities generally have an abundance of older masonry and masonry buildings that “perform poorly in seismic tremors,” Segal added.

Unlike some earthquake-prone jurisdictions in California that require older homes and buildings to be retrofitted to meet modern seismic standards, New York's building codes generally do not. Most of the city's housing was built before 1995, when the laws were adopted.

“It's all about weighing the risks,” Bray said. “These are rare events, and as you know, today we saw 45 miles west of Manhattan a 4.8 magnitude earthquake with no or minimal infrastructure impact. This is good news for all of us. I think at this point we're weighing the risk factors carefully.” Appropriate.

Guglielmo said the lack of damage reported Friday should give the public confidence in general.

“I realize that some ground shaking and building swaying can be unsettling to those who do not feel it frequently,” she said. “However, the performance of the infrastructure shows that they should feel completely safe in their communities.”

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