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SHAKE AND BLOW
Rare quake jolts eastern US, sparks evacuations
by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) Aug 23, 2011

The strongest earthquake to strike the eastern United States in more than a century jolted the US capital Tuesday and sparked fearful evacuations from skyscrapers in New York.

The eastern seaboard rarely experiences large earthquakes and many workers were bewildered -- and feared the worst -- as their desks swayed violently and the ceilings and walls shook with ominous force.

In a region about to relive the trauma of 9/11 on the 10th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda attacks, many suspected terrorism as they raced down stairways to parks and street corners on a pleasant summer afternoon.

"I was in the street when the ground shook and I looked up to see the building shaking like a tuning fork," Mary Daley told AFP in New York City.

Thousands of workers fled office buildings and poured into the streets of Manhattan to be herded by police towards open areas, trying in vain to use overloaded cell phone services to contact loved ones.

In a bizarre legal twist, the quake prompted the early closure of courthouse offices, meaning former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn had to wait until Wednesday to collect his passport and leave the country after sexual assault charges against him were dropped.

Fatima Richardson, 28, who was sitting on the steps of New York's state courthouse on her lunch break, told AFP: "You could see the building moving. I was just freaking out."

The 5.8-magnitude quake, which lasted 20-30 seconds and had an epicenter 3.7 miles (six kilometers) under the small Virginia town of Mineral, was felt as far away as Boston and even in parts of Canada.

The Pentagon, the US Capitol and Washington's historic monuments were all evacuated and airports suffered delays, but the damage was restricted to only a handful of buildings and there were no reports of casualties.

There was little damage in Mineral itself, where many windows were broken and some chimneys cracked but church bell towers were still in place.

Power was out, however, in the small town of 8,000 where many locals work at a nearby nuclear plant.

President Barack Obama was not at the White House and did not feel the quake as he was playing golf some 500 miles (800 kilometers) away in tranquil Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.

But people as far away as Ottawa, Canada to the north and Atlanta, Georgia to the south did report feeling the temblor, as did residents in the midwestern US states of Indiana and Michigan.

Scientists said the harder, more brittle quality of the ground explained why rare tremors on the US east coast are often felt over an area many times bigger than those of a similar magnitude on the more quake-prone west coast.

The temblor also hit as emergency officials warned that Hurricane Irene, which was roaring through the Atlantic, may strike the eastern US seaboard this weekend.

Briefed by his aides, Obama was told "there are no initial reports of major infrastructure damage, including at airports and nuclear facilities," said deputy White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

In Washington, the National Cathedral lost part of its towering neo-Gothic spires and suffered cracks in its flying buttresses after the quake struck at 1751 GMT.

Traffic in and around the capital was gridlocked and rail services were slowed, but DC fire and emergency spokesman Pete Piringer said there were no reports of serious damage or injuries.

Near the epicenter in Virginia, the 1,800 megawatt North Anna nuclear power station declared an alert after losing electricity from the grid, but its safety systems kicked in and it was soon operating normally, officials said.

The US Geological Survey said the epicenter was 38 miles (61 kilometers) from Richmond, Virginia, and 84 miles (135 kilometers) from Washington.

It was the largest quake in Virginia since May 1897, when a 5.9 quake struck near the state's western edge.

The Pentagon, the world's biggest office building located across the River Potomac from the capital, ordered a brief evacuation, which was carried out calmly.

Several hundred people streamed out of the building and officials said there was no damage other than a ruptured water line.




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Why East Coast earthquakes travel so far
Washington (AFP) Aug 23, 2011 - A rare 5.8 earthquake that rattled the eastern United States on Tuesday was felt over a wide area from Toronto, Canada down to Georgia due to the hard, brittle quality of the ground, experts said.

The quake that struck mid-afternoon near Richmond, Virginia was the strongest in the state since 1897, and shook the eastern seaboard for some 30 seconds, sparking a wave of panic among residents.

"Earthquakes of this magnitude are unusual in your area, but the fact that you shook so hard and the event was actually some distance from you is not unusual," Thomas Jordan, director of Southern California Earthquake Center based at the University of Southern California, told AFP by phone.

The outer rocky shell of the Earth, known as the lithosphere, is colder on the East Coast than in California, which is well known for experiencing frequent earthquakes.

"So when something shakes, it is like hitting a bar of steel, it rings pretty well. Whereas on the West Coast, the rocks are higher temperature and it is more like hitting something quite a bit softer," he said.

Lucy Jones, a USGS spokeswoman, said the West Coast crust is broken up by active faults so it "doesn't do as good of a job of transmitting the energy."

"On the East Coast, you have this old, hard, cold crust that does a lovely job of transmitting the waves like a solid bell," she said on CNN, so that an earthquake "can definitely be felt hundreds of miles away."

The US East Coast has plenty of fault lines, but they are ancient, and are inside a creaky plate that is under pressure from being jostled and pushed by other plates, experts said.

Occasionally, pressure builds up and stresses will be released in earthquakes, like the one on Tuesday.

"They are faults that used to be very active faults hundreds of millions of years ago, unlike the faults on the West Coast... (that) are active today," Jordan said.

Jack Boatwright, a seismologist with USGS, told AFP that one aftershock of 2.8 magnitude was recorded in the hour following the quake.

Other parts of the world that are similar to the US East Coast in terms of earthquake dynamics would include India, as well as some parts of Russia and Australia, he added.

"In India, that large triangle is relatively old, so we think that it conducts energy similarly," he said.

Other differences between East and West Coast quakes are the sounds they make -- residents of California are less likely to hear banging associated with a big quake unless they are very near the epicenter, he said.

"On the East Coast you might hear it many kilometers (miles) away, so don't distrust the people who said they heard it," Boatwright said.

Jordan added that the likelihood of a bigger quake in the near future was minimal.

"There is a small probability that this could be the first of a set of earthquakes and there could a larger earthquake coming, but the chances of that are small, about three to five percent."

On the US East Coast, where brick and wood buildings are not typically built to withstand shaking, a local official in Virginia said they were investigating calls of structural damage.

Washington's National Cathedral reported "significant damage," with parts of three of the central tower's four pinnacles, its uppermost spires, having fallen off. No one was injured by the falling debris.

"On the East Coast you have a lot of structures that, since they haven't been built to withstand earthquakes, don't do a very good job if they are actually shaking," said Jordan.

Any damage that occurs is typically close to the epicenter in such quakes, and the area where the quake struck was not a heavily populated town center.





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SHAKE AND BLOW
26 injured in China quake: state media
Beijing (AFP) Aug 11, 2011
A 5.2-magnitude earthquake that struck China's far-western region of Xinjiang on Thursday injured at least 26 people, three of them critically, state media said. The quake occurred in an area near the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar at a depth of nearly 35 kilometres (22 miles), the US Geological Survey said. It toppled more than 30 housing units, a spokesman with the Jiashi County Com ... read more


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