NEW YORK — A 4.8-magnitude earthquake struck northern New Jersey on Friday morning, producing tremors that were felt in New York City and as far away as Maryland and Massachusetts.
No injuries or fatalities have been reported in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania or Washington, D.C. By 12:30 p.m., no extensive damage to buildings had been detected, including in New York City, though assessments were underway in the areas that felt the quake.
The strong and sudden shaking startled millions of people up and down the East Coast.
“We thought something had exploded,” Tom Reilly, 73, of Lebanon Township, N.J., told The Washington Post by phone.
He was near the epicenter, picking up pizzas, when the temblor hit. “That’s the only thing that could cause something like that in New Jersey that we could think of,” he added.
There have been no reported injuries or fatalities in New Jersey, according to Sgt. Charles Marchan, a spokesman with the state police. He said inspections of “critical infrastructures” are taking place.
President Biden has been briefed on the earthquake and spoke to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), the White House said. The administration is in communication with state and local officials.
“We’re taking this extremely seriously,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said at a late-morning news conference. The state was not aware of any life-threatening consequences, Hochul said. Assessments for potential damage are underway.
The temblor was felt across a large swath of the eastern United States from Maryland to Connecticut, according to the USGS, including in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston. About five seconds of slight shaking was felt in Cape Cod, Mass.
Earthquakes tend to be felt across wider distances on the East Coast of the United States than on the West Coast. Rock formations in the east are denser, allowing shaking to easily transfer across hundreds if not thousands of miles, according to the USGS.
“It just absolutely did not click for me that this was an earthquake,” said Lillian Ruiz, 36, a business consultant who was working from home in a quasi-industrial corner of Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. “I thought, sinkhole. I thought, structural collapse. … An earthquake just made no sense.”
The shaking caused Hector, a 24-year-old food deliveryman who declined to share his full name so that he could speak freely, to lose control of his bicycle and fall, scraping his cheek, he told The Post.
“In seriousness, I thought I maybe ate or drank something that made me high,” he said in Spanish. Hailing from Mexico City, he said he was no stranger to earthquakes but that “I was unprepared for one to arrive on a Friday morning in Brooklyn. It’s like a snowstorm coming to Miami.”
The earthquake could cause some flight delays, the Federal Aviation Administration said. It reported that the quake may affect air traffic control facilities in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
The agency said in a statement that operations were resuming as quickly as possible. The New York-area airspace is among the busiest and most complex in the country, and disruptions to it can ripple through the national airspace system.
Meanwhile, Amtrak restricted speeds on its trains throughout the Northeast and began track inspections. Service was suspended on South Jersey’s transit line, PATCO.
New Jersey activated its emergency operations center, Murphy said on X.
National Weather Service bureaus in New Jersey and Boston said they have received many reports of the shaking. People took to X, formerly Twitter, to confirm what they had just felt.
“Did we just have an earthquake?! NYC,” actress Jessica Chastain posted.
“I thought it was a train going by,” one user said on X. Another said, “Felt the townhouse swaying.”
“I AM FINE,” the account for the Empire State Building posted about a minute after the quake.
It was not immediately clear what caused the earthquake. It occurred along the Piedmont, a plateau that runs along the east side of the Appalachian Mountains, and because that formation contains relatively old, dense rock, its shaking spread across hundreds of miles.
“The energy transfers pretty efficiently through those types of rocks,” David Wunsch, the Delaware state geologist, told The Post.
Any damage is likely to be minor and confined to areas near the epicenter and could include small objects toppling over or, at worst, some damage to poorly maintained masonry, Wunsch said.
Whatever caused the quake, it is unlikely to be anything of great geologic significance, said Leslie Sonder, an associate professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth.
“It’s noteworthy because people felt it, but in geologic terms, it’s just one of many over time,” she said. “It has social significance, but its geologic significance, it’s pretty generic.”
The part of northern New Jersey where the quake occurred contains what Wunsch called failed rift valleys — places where a continent began to split hundreds of millions of years ago, leaving fault lines behind.
“It may be some readjustment related to that,” he said.
Across the region, people were startled. The Philadelphia Police Department asked people to stop calling 911 to report the quake unless they had an emergency.
It was felt in a meeting of the U.N. Security Council in New York, where cameras shook and proceedings paused as a murmur went through the room. “You’re making the ground shake,” Palestinian U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour joked to Save the Children CEO Janti Soeripto, who was speaking about Gaza, Reuters reporter Michelle Nichols posted on X.
The USGS originally reported the 4.8 quake near Lebanon, N.J., then adjusted the location to Whitehouse Station, a neighboring town in Hunterdon County.
“Earthquakes are uncommon but not unheard of along the Atlantic Coast,” the USGS Earthquakes said on X. A magnitude 5.8 earthquake in central Virginia was felt by millions in 2011.
This story will be updated.
Lori Aratani, Matt Viser and Brian Murphy contributed to this report.
