NEW YORK, Jan. 17 Pictures rattled, bottles shook and residents from Queens to Newark, N.J., were rattled Wednesday morning by a small earthquake that measured 2.5 on the Richter scale.
Standing in front of a building where residents reported significant shaking, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said there was no need for New Yorkers to worry because even a more powerful earthquake registering 4 or 5 on the Richter scale would not have an impact on large buildings.
A geology professor at Stony Brook University in Long Island, Dan Davis, said the incident occurred at 7:34 a.m. and lasted a few seconds. The epicenter appeared to be about 10 miles outside of Newark.
This was an extremely unexceptional event except for the fact that it occurred in such a densely populated area, Davis said.
He said such events in this area are not exactly rare: We usually get an event big enough to be felt by people in New York City at least once or twice a decade. The last quake was a 4.0 tremor in 1985 based in Ardsley, a Westchester suburb, north of the city.
Davis said one of the largest quakes in the area was a 5.2 magnitude quake in 1884, which he said was at least 500 times stronger than this event. The first reports appeared to come from resident in Long Island City, Queens.
