By Liana Grey
New York buildings felt the tremor of a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that struck near Richmond, Virginia yesterday afternoon. Workers at City Hall evacuated and court officers shepherded people out of the federal court house.
Building supervisors at 20 West 22nd Street went office-to-office telling tenants to be prepared to evacuate in the event there were further tremors following the earthquake shortly after 2 p.m. “It was a pretty weird feeling,” said one office worker there. “I could feel the building sway, like the wind was blowing it.”
New York buildings felt the tremor of a 5.8 magnitude earthquake that struck near Richmond, Virginia yesterday afternoon. Workers at City Hall evacuated and court officers shepherded people out of the federal court house.
Building supervisors at 20 West 22nd Street went office-to-office telling tenants to be prepared to evacuate in the event there were further tremors following the earthquake shortly after 2 p.m. “It was a pretty weird feeling,” said one office worker there.
“I could feel the building sway, like the wind was blowing it.” The earthquake comes just two months after Real Estate Weekly exclusively reported that some experts were warning New York City was well overdue for the phenomenon.
Engineers at a conference hosted by the American Council of Engineering Companies said that a fault line, an earthquake could still happen. “We are practically overdue for one,” said Sissy Nikolaou, an expert in seismic design at Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, a New York based firm.
The conference heard what the city has already done to protect itself from seismic disaster. Work has been carried out to protect at-risk structures like JFK’s light rail system, which is built on soil likely to liquefy.
The city’s building code was last updated with latest seismic design measures in 2008, affecting a handful of projects that rose towards the end of the real estate boom, and will be revised again next year.
The Brooklyn Bridge and other East River crossings were strengthened with steel girders during renovations in 2005, as part of a government mandate requiring important infrastructure to be shielded from shock waves.
While much of Manhattan is built on “the hardest rock you can find on Earth,” Nikolaou said, Chinatown sits above an ancient lake that once supplied water to the city. Parts of lower Manhattan, including Battery Park City, were built on landfill that would crack and spout water in the event of a tectonic shift.
Nikolau has advocated more stringent measures for earthquake protection, including thorough inspections of the rock layers beneath a construction site.
Panelists who investigated structural damage to the World Trade Center after 9/11 said lessons from the day’s attacks carry over to earthquake protection.
“The risk of the hazard is moderate, but the effects of the hazard can be significant,” said Nikolaou.
As Real Estate Weekly went to press, the were no reports of major structural damage from the Virginia quake, although a spokesman for Washington National Cathedral — 80 miles from the epicenter — said three of four pinnacles on the central tower had fallen off.
