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DARIEN – A magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocked parts of Connecticut earlier today.
According to the United States Geological Survey, the earthquake’s epicenter was near Whitehouse Station, New Jersey and occurred at 10:23 am.
The tremors were felt in New York City as well as Boston and Philadelphia.
Darien resident Susan Luecke said she was sitting on her couch when it started shaking. “I thought it was the washing machine that I overloaded with towels.” Luecke said she immediately started receiving texts from friends all over the Northeast sharing their accounts of the earthquake. She even heard from her children who are students at Darien High School that they felt the quake in class.
At 11:07 am, the Darien School Superintendent sent an email to parents informing them that “everyone is safe” and that there is no reported property damage, at this time.
According to Greenwich Deputy Police Chief Mark Zuccerella, students from Central Middle School were moved to Greenwich High School following the earthquake due to concerns stemming from construction work being done at the middle school. He said there were no reports of structural damage and the decision for the relocation was made “out of an abundance of caution.” The department is reporting that all students have been relocated safely.
Seismologist Jeffrey Park, professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Yale, said that an earthquake of this magnitude in the tri-state area is not uncommon but that they typically occur only once every decade.
“Earthquakes that large have happened in the last half century. It’s still a seismically active area, just not like California,“ he said. He believes the area’s last earthquake of similar magnitude happened in the 1970s on the Ramapo fault which runs through New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Park said today’s quake was reminiscent of a 5.8 earthquake that shook Virginia in 2011, as both areas are still recovering from glaciation that occurred thousands of years ago. “Ten thousand years ago this area was covered with a kilometer of ice and it’s been rebounding ever since.” He said the area’s geologic conditions make earthquakes difficult to predict because they can occur on old fault lines that build up stress over time.
He cautioned that today’s event is likely the most significant earthquake the area will experience for another decade. “But that being said, every time that there’s an earthquake of this size, it changes the stresses on all the other nearby faults. So there probably will be more tremors in the next days and weeks but they probably won’t be felt in Connecticut,” he said.
This story has been updated