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Earthquake shuts down Virginia nuclear plant
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.9 struck Tuesday afternoon near Washington, D.C., the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The epicenter was in Mineral, Virginia. The quake was four miles deep, according to the USGS. Did you feel it? Send CNN an iReport.
To get complete coverage and all the latest updates, click on CNN's main story here. View a CNN Open Story about the quake. CNN Open Story combines iReports with reports from CNNers across the globe on a map and timeline.
Update 3:36 p.m. ET: Terminal A at Washington Reagan National Airport has been evacuated because of an odor of gas, airport spokeswoman Courtney Mickalonis said. Initial sweeps of the building showed no major damage from the earthquake.
Light structural damage has been reported in Culpepper and Orange counties in Virginia, said Laura Southard of the state Emergency Operations Center. She said there have been no reports of injuries in Virginia.
Update 3:28 p.m. ET: The White House and adjacent buildings evacuated as a precaution following the earthquake have been given the all-clear, the U.S. Secret Service said. The FBI and Justice Department have also reopened evacuated buildings.
Update 3:25 p.m. ET: East Coast residents should be prepared to feel aftershocks from Tuesday's earthquake, a U.S. Geological Survey official said.
Update 3:22 p.m. ET: The North Anna nuclear power plant, located 20 miles from the epicenter, is shut down and in a safe condition, a company official and the Louisa County public information office report. There has been no release of nuclear material, Louisa County spokeswoman Amanda Reidelbach said.
Update 3:04 p.m. ET: All national monuments and parks in Washington are "stable but closed" following Tuesday's earthquake, a United States Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser said. A couple of minor injuries and some minor structural damage have been reported in Washington, following Tuesday's earthquake, according to Schlosser.
Part of the central tower of the National Cathedral, the highest point in Washington, was damaged, according to spokesman Richard Weinberg. "It looks like three of the pinnacles have broken off the central tower," Weinberg told CNN.
Update 3:02 p.m. ET: Amtrak is reporting service disruptions between Washington and Baltimore because of the earthquake, the company reported on Twitter.
Aftershocks are a concern, U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones told CNN. "People should be expecting (them), especially over the next hour or two," she said.
The quake was felt in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York City and on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where President Barack Obama is vacationing. It's unknown if the president felt the quake.
The Pentagon has been evacuated, CNN's Barbara Starr reports. "When the building began shaking rather violently, hundreds of people began streaming out," she said, because many people thought that the building was under attack. Starr was standing in the Pentagon's press office when the roof started to shake.
Cell phone service has been disrupted in New York City, CNN learned within minutes of the quake.
Updated 2:47 p.m. ET: A "considerable amount" of water from a water pipe has flooded two corridors of the Pentagon, according to an announcement in the building. People who work in those areas are being asked to stay in their offices while workers try to repair the damage.
The National Cathedral in Washington is damaged, CNN has confirmed.
And Dominion Generation, which operates the North Anna nuclear power station in central Virginia a few miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, is trying to reach operational staff at the plant, according to a company spokesman. Landlines to the plant appear to be down.
Shortly after the quake struck, traders in the New York Stock Exchange also felt the quake and shouted to each other, "Keep trading!" CNN's business correspondent Alison Kosik reported from the floor at 2:20 p.m. E.T.
Twitter traffic suggests the quake was felt all over the East Coast.
In Philadelphia, HunterPence3 tweeted, "Wow Earthquake just shook the entire locker room!"
In Cleveland, "tribeinsider" wrote "I'm no expert but i think we just had an earthquake here."
And even in Toronto, Canada, tweets said that the shaking could be felt for minutes.
Pete Krech, who works at a business in Fredericksburg, Virginia, likened the sensation to being on a jolting amusement ride. "I was receiving a supply truck," said Krech, store manager at Mattress Warehouse of Fredericksburg, south of Washington. "I felt a vibration under my feet."
Brendan Wein, a sales representative at Hoffman Nursery in Roxboro, North Carolina, said he thought there was a helicopter flying above his work building. "I was literally shaking in my chair," he said.
CNN iReporter Jeff Yapalater said he was in his backyard in New York's Long Island when the earthquake hit. "Suddenly I felt this light swaying of the Earth. I'd never felt that before, so I thought maybe I was experiencing vertigo for a moment, and it lasted maybe 30 seconds ... We're feeling this really far away!" he wrote.
soundoff (12,567 Responses)
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Maybe now they will get something done in DC since Congress is gone. lol
I was at Wells Fargo In Reading, Pa when I felt the shaking. I thought it was my cell phone that I had put on vibrate in my pocket, until I noticed my chair and arms shaking. I've never experienced anything like this!!
I am in an odd part of a building in north Atlanta, and I guess the structure resonated with the quake, there was a tiny rythmic shaking of my computer monitor around the time of the quake. Note that my monitor often shakes when people walk by, but this was strangely different, so I took note of it and assumed I would never know why it happened.
We felt it in Morehead City, NC. We all wondered if it was bombing pratice or a thunderstorm. Schocked to find out this is what we felt.
a 5.8 eh, well on the west coast we deal with this all the time, weenies
No one is being a "weenie" or being silly... you may deal with earthquakes all the time, but we don't. Something like that comes as a major surprise to us on the east coast and we have the right to talk about it. Read it again, correctly this time, and see that no one is being a "weenie" or "silly" as you like to put it. There are reports of it being felt up in Canada all the way down to North Carolina. How often has that happened?
Stop the silly panic–there is no damge here in Central Virgina, just north of Charlottesville! Nor did my family in Richmond see any damage.
"silly panic"? there have been no 5.5 magnitude registered earthquake or feltin the history of the state of Virginia or in other Eastern state, the last recorded earthquake was in 1875 when a 4.8 struck central Virginia.
Oh well, then if YOUR family's ok, no need to worry about other human beings. How silly of us. Back to the little pink house.
One of CNN's reporters said "there aren't any faults in Virginia." Perhaps he should have referred to the USGS website. There are, indeed, faults in Virginia. Earthquakes DO NOT occur without a geophysical fault. 5.8 is not a "big" earthquake.
We felt a big enough tremor to shake an entire apt building that house 12 nice sized two bed room apts. We are in Charleston WV.
Felt it here in ATL.
Felt it at 1:53 pm in Towanda, PA. It lasted for about 30 – 45 seconds.
EARTHQUAKES IN THE CENTRAL VIRGINIA SEISMIC ZONE
Since at least 1774, people in central Virginia have felt small earthquakes and suffered damage from infrequent larger ones. The largest damaging earthquake (magnitude 4.8) in the seismic zone occurred in 1875. Smaller earthquakes that cause little or no damage are felt each year or two.
Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi).
FAULTS
Earthquakes everywhere occur on faults within bedrock, usually miles deep. Most bedrock beneath central Virginia was assembled as continents collided to form a supercontinent about 500-300 million years ago, raising the Appalachian Mountains. Most of the rest of the bedrock formed when the supercontinent rifted apart about 200 million years ago to form what are now the northeastern U.S., the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe.
At well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California, often scientists can determine the name of the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake. In contrast, east of the Rocky Mountains this is rarely the case. The Central Virginia seismic zone is far from the nearest plate boundaries, which are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea. The seismic zone is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even the known faults are poorly located at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few, if any, earthquakes in the seismic zone can be linked to named faults. It is difficult to determine if a known fault is still active and could slip and cause an earthquake. As in most other areas east of the Rockies, the best guide to earthquake hazards in the seismic zone is the earthquakes themselves.
It rocked Richmond, VA. Everyone was in the middle of the streets.
I guess this was due. The last "big one" in Virginia (about a 5.8 on the Richter scale) was on May 31, 1897, in Pearisburg, so every 100 yrs or so the major plate in VA shifts.
we felt very stong tremmor here in Sinking Spring, PA, north of Philladelphia
OK. So now is it time to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear plant?