Earth Tremor Shakes Downtown Madison

An earthquake this afternoon centered in Virginia was felt as far as Madison, 424 miles away from the epicenter, according to people who work at Madison Investment Center on Wall Street and in the Hull Building nearby.

No damage or injuries were reported, other than several people who felt queasy after they saw the walls move and felt their chairs wiggle. Still, it was nerve wracking enough to prompt more than a dozen people to leave their buildings in downtown Madison while they figured it out.

"Our whole office shook," said Rachel Niemiec, via email, just minutes after the quake hit in Virginia. "The walls were moving & we felt sick!"

Monica Piombino, in the comments below this story, said,  "I was working at the St Margaret Parish Center on Academy St. Our offices are up on the third floor and our desks and chairs started shaking. It felt as if the building was crumbling beneath us. We all evacuated the building quickly!"

Catherine Donovan, on Conestoga Drive, just a few miles from downtown Madison, reports, "I thought the washing machine was overloaded and shaking the house. The entire kitchen floor was shaking here on Conestoga Drive." Read more comments below and add yours. Let us know where you were, if you felt anything, or not.

Evacuating the building, just to be on the safe side

Craig Bernard of the Madison Investment Center said he realized something was going on when the ceiling fan in his office started swaying and his chair started to move. He, his son Devin, Rachel, and the others in the office headed out to the parking lot just to be on the safe side.

A Madison Patch reader reported on Facebook that she was on the beach and did not feel a thing. Another in North Madison reported feeling the quake. Yet another in the Aerodome Building downtown on the Boston Post Road reported feeling it.

A Patch reader reporting in on Twitter said the quake was felt across much of the east coast, stretching to Ohio. Almost as quickly as the earth tremor, also known as a temblor, traveled away from the epicenter of the quake around Mineral, VA, reports flashed out on Twitter of buildings swaying up and down the eastern seaboard and as far away as Ohio. Just moments after the quake hit, Twitter logged 5,500 Tweets per second.

Epicenter about 41 miles from Richmond, VA

The U.S. Geological Service reports that a 5.9 magnitude earthquake hit at 1:51:03 p.m. Tuesday about 4 miles from Mineral, VA, about 41 miles from Richmond, VA, and about 83 miles from Washington, DC. The exact location was recorded at 37.975 N and 77.969 W. Buildings were evacuated in Washington, D.C., according to news reports.

On the U.S. Geological Service website, people reported feeling the temblor as far away as Black Mountain, NC (461 miles away), Granville, OH (460 miles away), Jamestown, NY ( 475 miles away), and Englewood, NJ (479 miles away).

On HuffPost Tom Zeller reported: "Don Blakeman, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado, said that it was not unprecedented to have earthquakes of this magnitude in the Eastern United States, and that USGS staff was investigating to determine whether a temblor of this kind in Virginia has ever been felt." Read more on HuffPost.

Governor Dannel P. Malloy released the following statement: “The movement people in Connecticut felt was associated with the earthquake which originated in Virginia.  Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection staff is at the Emergency Operations Center as a precaution, but at this point, there have been no reports of injury or damage.” The center was later closed, shortly after 4:30 p.m.

"The walls were moving"

Teg Cosgriff, a partner and consultant with Steps 4 Success who also works at Mac Works in the Hull Building on Wall Street, said he was sitting in the store, talking with his wife Sue on the phone when his swivel chair started moving. "I looked up and the walls were moving," he said. "Then I realized the whole building was moving."

He looked outside and saw others from buildings nearby piling out into the parking lot and he joined them.

Brendan Miller, who helps operate Camp Med O Lark from an office on the second floor of the Hull Building on Wall Street, said he initially thought he felt a strong gust of wind. Then he realized there was no wind.  "It was like, this building is moving and a brick building should not be moving."

Shortly after he got to the parking lot, he got an alert on his iPhone that a earthquake had hit in Virginia. He called his wife in Clinton to make sure she was OK. She was and hadn't felt a thing.

Four other quakes affect East Coast over hundreds of years

According to the United States Geological Survey’s summary of Connecticut’s earthquake history, at least four other earthquakes originating elsewhere on the East Coast rippled on to this state in the past several hundred years.

Numerous minor earthquakes have also struck the state, with the most serious one occurring in 1791 in East Haddam. In this quake, chimneys and stone walls were damaged in two severe jolts and in Clinton, about 12 miles away, “a Capt. Benedict, walking the deck of his vessel, then lying in the harbor at that place, observed the fish to leap out of the water in every direction as far as his eyes could reach."

Today’s earthquake caused the evacuation of buildings in Washington, D.C. and some damage to the National Cathedral, according to the New York Times. A nuclear power plant was taken offline, Amtrak service was delayed, and phone systems were taxed by numerous calls.

New Haven Open evacuated

In Connecticut, the stadium at Yale University hosting the New Haven Open was evacuated. There are comments below this story from Patch columnist Sarah Page Kyrcz on the activity at the Open.

Besides the 1791 earthquake, tremors also originated near Hartford in 1837, 1840, and 1925; New Haven in 1858; Stamford in 1953; and southern Connecticut in 1968.

One curious incident struck New London directly in August of 1935. A “strange quivering” hit the city around 4 a.m. on Aug. 9 of that year, according to the New York Times archive. The cause was “laid to ‘rolling quake’ or a meteor.”

Other earthquakes ...

Other earthquakes that have occurred outside the region and been felt in Connecticut, according to the USGS:

• An earthquake near Three Rivers, Quebec on Feb. 5, 1663, which caused “moderate effects” in parts of the state.
• Tremors centering in Massachusetts in November of 1727 and November of 1755, which were “felt strongly” in Connecticut.
• An earthquake in November of 1935 near Timiskaming, Ontario, which affected one million square miles of Canada and the United States and cracked windowpanes in Cornwall.
• A quake near Massena, N.Y. in September of 1944, which had “mild effects” in Hartford, Marion, New Haven, and Meriden.