A New York resident has shared her experience with Newsweek about a sudden earthquake that hit the area on Friday morning.
The densely populated New York City metropolitan area was quite literally shaken on Friday as an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.7 hit the Eastern seaboard, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
“I was just bringing a glass of water back from the kitchen to my bedroom—where I work—and everything started to shake. Mirrors and pictures moved. The floor was moving,” Claire Hillier told Newsweek.
Hit with initial confusion, she turned to TikTok to ask others if they were experiencing the same thing.
“I think we just had an earthquake,” she theorized, noticeably confused by the sudden event.
Quickly people on the social media platform rushed to respond to Hillier’s video.
“Yes, it was crazy!” one TikTok user wrote, while another commented: “Yes, I’m in Queens, NY.”
“I felt it too, got scared,” wrote another Queens resident, with another user from Bergen County, New Jersey, wrote: “I felt it.”
Not long after, she updated followers in a new video as news reports broke that the USGS had officially declared that the quake was centered near Lebanon, New Jersey.
“Guys, when I tell you, I literally thought I was going crazy, I thought there’d been an explosion cause the entire building shook,” she said.
@claireinnyc/TikTok
While earthquake rates in the northeastern U.S. are between 50 and 200 times lower than in California, the earthquakes that do occur can be felt over a much broader region, explaining why the quake that started in New Jersey was felt in the middle of New York City.
The largest known earthquake in the New York City region occurred in 1884 and had a magnitude of around 5.0—making it just a few points stronger than this one.
“And I know if you live in San Francisco, you’re just gonna be, like, shut up. We get this all the time. We don’t care. New York doesn’t get this. We don’t know about these things,” she added in her TikTok video.
Recalling the moment, Hillier told Newsweek: “My first thought was this must be a manhole exploding but as time went on—several seconds—I realized it must have been an earthquake. I went to TikTok because I figured there would be updates and I’d know whether this was an explosion vs something else.”
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.