An earthquake shakes New York and New Jersey, but causes only minor damage

At a general store in New Jersey, near the epicenter, the sound was so loud that employees thought a truck had crashed into the building.

Five miles away, in some horse stables, the ground shook so violently that it sent three horses galloping around the ring.

Within hours, a custom T-shirt shop in Manhattan was already selling a souvenir: a T-shirt reading “I Survived the New York City Earthquake, April 5, 2024.”

For most of the millions of people who felt the 4.8-magnitude quake that sent tremors from Philadelphia to Boston on Friday morning, it was a harmless novelty in a part of the country unaccustomed to seismic tremors.

But tremors shook buildings in New York City and sent stunned residents into the streets. Aftershocks continued throughout the day Friday, including a magnitude 4.0 just before 6 p.m. that was widely felt in New York and New Jersey.

Aftershocks will likely “last for several days and even a week,” said Kishore S. Jaiswal, a research structural engineer with the USGS. There is also little chance of an earthquake of equal or even greater magnitude occurring during such a sequence, he said.

New York officials said they had been in contact with counties as well as nuclear facilities across the state, and there were no reports of damage except for a gas leak in Rockland County. “Fortunately here in New York State, we are masters of disaster,” Governor Kathy Hochul said. “We know how to handle this.”

New Jersey Governor Philip D. Murphy, who was out of state attending a conference, said in a televised interview that reports of structural damage were “minimal.”

Based on USGS data, the quake, whose epicenter was at Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, about 40 miles west of New York City, was the third strongest quake within 250 miles of the city since 1950.

Even as sirens were heard across New York, the police department, fire department and Con Edison said they had no immediate reports of damage. Mayor Eric Adams, who was attending a gun violence prevention meeting at Gracie Mansion, said he didn't even feel the quake and his staff told him about it. “New Yorkers should go about their normal day,” he said at a midday news conference.

But the quake also exposed apparent flaws in New York's emergency notification system, after the Adams administration was criticized for a delayed response to flooding and wildfire smoke. On Friday, text alerts were received warning residents to stay indoors a half-hour or more after the quake. (In earthquake-prone areas like California and Japan, a network of earthquake sensors detect shaking, so alerts can arrive seconds before an earthquake strikes.)

Zach Escol, New York City's emergency management commissioner, defended the city's alerts, saying officials should confirm with the US Geological Survey that the tremor was in fact caused by an earthquake. Alerts are sent in 14 languages.

By the standards of larger earthquakes that can cause massive devastation, Friday's tremors were very minor. The earthquake that struck the Northridge neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1994, with a magnitude of 6.7 on the Richter scale, caused billions of dollars in damage and killed 57 people, was more than 700 times stronger than the earthquake that struck the northeast of the country on Friday.

At its epicenter in New Jersey, Friday's quake produced tremors with a magnitude of about V on the Mercalli intensity scale, which is the average intensity of tremors reported by people who felt them. The scale uses Roman numerals. Damage to buildings usually starts at about level seven on the scale, according to Ron Hamburger, one of the country's leading structural engineers who specializes in earthquake safety. He said Friday's earthquake “would not have been a significant event in California.”

But throughout New York and New Jersey, the suddenness of the shaking and unfamiliarity with earthquakes left many people stunned.

At Whitehouse Station, Valorie Brennan heard a train-like roar before she felt any vibration.

“I thought my furnace had exploded,” she said. “My dogs ran to the back of the house to hide.”

At the riding stables in Califon, New Jersey, pictures of show jumping horses fell from the walls of the rink and crashed, as riders dismounted and tried to calm their trembling horses as aftershocks rang under their hooves.

In Manhattan's Marble Hill neighborhood, Ada Carrasco was washing dishes in her third-floor apartment when the shaking started. “I felt it, but at first, I thought to myself: ‘Am I dizzy?’ But then the shaking kept going and I ran out the door,” she said in Spanish.

“I've never experienced this in my life,” said Christina Fili, who works behind the counter at Oldwick General Store in New Jersey. The earthquake did not cause damage, but rather echoed for 30 seconds throughout the store. Everyone froze, Mrs. Feeley said, and several minutes passed before the floor was firm enough to move.

Friday's earthquake occurred along the Ramapo fault system, which are cracks between two blocks of rock in the Earth's crust. The system passes through the northern arms of the Appalachian Mountains in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The size of the 4.8 fault was too large for the fault system, according to Folarin Kolawole, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is located in Palisades, New York.

“There hasn't been anything close to this for a long time,” Dr. Kolawole said in an interview.

At Lincoln Center, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra briefly delayed the start of its 11 a.m. performance because alerts were still going off on people's phones.

At the United Nations in Manhattan, Riyad Mansour, a Palestinian diplomat, joked that Janti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children USA, was “earth-shaking” when she presented an update to the Security Council on Gaza just as the earthquake struck.

While earthquakes in New York City come as surprises to most people, seismologists say the ground is not as stable as New Yorkers might think. A 2008 study found that a magnitude 5 earthquake occurs in the region about once every century. It is estimated that a magnitude 7 times larger occurs every 3,400 years.

In the early 2000s, the city began requiring building designers to take seismic considerations into account. Before then, the main natural threat covered by the city's building code was wind, which can exert very strong pressure on buildings, especially skyscrapers. The vast majority of New York City's 1.1 million buildings were built before 2000 and therefore were not designed with earthquakes in mind.

However, even the new requirements are much less stringent than those in California, where buildings must generally be designed to withstand earthquakes three times as strong. The state's constellation of major seismic faults can produce earthquakes much stronger than those seen on the East Coast.

“I would describe the risk of a major earthquake disaster in New York as very low, even given the stock of older buildings,” said Mr. Hamburger, a structural engineer who specializes in earthquake safety.

Hours after the earthquake struck on Friday, things returned to normal. There were no reports of structural damage to the subway system, and there were no service interruptions as a result of the quake, Michael Kemper, chief of the NYPD's Transportation Division, said in a social media post.

United Airlines said in a statement that a “small number” of flights had been diverted away from Newark Liberty International Airport, but it was working to move those flights to the airport as soon as possible.

For Clara Dossiter, 23, and her father, David Dossiter, 67, the quake was an opportunity. Mr. Dossiter was visiting New York from San Francisco, and they were preparing to go up to the Empire State Building when the earthquake struck. Mrs. Dossiter asked her father if they should reconsider.

“He was like, 'No, that's better because there won't be anyone there,'” she said.

Reporting from around the Northeast was contributed by Lula Vadulu, Jaya Gupta, Horobi Miko, Michael Wilson and William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang, Emma Fitzsimmons, Sarah Maslin Nair, Erin Nolan, Mihir Zaveri, Maria Kramer, Grace Ashford, Camille Baker, Lysette Cruz, Michael Paulson, Patrick McGeehan, and Troy Clawson.

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