The Day The Earth Shook

At 1:51pm EST today, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake hit Mineral, VA.  The shock waves from the quake were felt 100’s of miles away in New York City, where I work.

I work in a 50+ floor office building in Lower Manhattan.  And while I was sitting at my desk on the 40-somethingth-floor I felt the “floor” beneath me start to shake and roll.  In New York, on a very windy day, it’s not unusual to feel a SLIGHT movement of a tall building moving in the wind if you are on a very high floor. But on a day with a beautiful blue sky with a few white puffy clouds and no wind, it is most certainly NOT normal to feel the floor shaking underfoot.

All the people near me stood up from our desks, and eerily, I just grabbed my purse and headed for the stairwell along with others who had put on their sneakers, grabbed their laptops and such.  We’ve done so many emergency action drills in our building, even though there was no alarm going off and no announcements from the building management, we all knew something was amiss and just went to the stairwells as we had been taught to do.

The stairwells were very crowded, but people were filing down the 50 floors and below in an orderly fashion. But it was warm in the staircase, and every couple of floors, I saw abandoned pairs of high heels or other kinds of shoes.  Some people left their coffee cups behind too.

When I got down to the street level, my legs were shaking badly and I was sweating. I’m an office worker, and I haven’t been doing the stair-master enough to represent sprinting down 40+ flights of stairs in a short period of time. (It made me realize that I do need to be able to do that in order to protect myself in the future during such emergencies.)

I made the decision to head to the train to go home to New Jersey, but I heard from work colleagues that some people went back inside the building, and still others decided not to leave the building at all either during or after the quake shockwaves.

In the coming days, the news reports have said we should expect additional after-shocks to occur, but they will be of a lower magnitude than the original event.  In some cases, we may not even feel it at all.  I hope so, because I for one would never like to be sitting on an upper floor of a skyscraper when an earthquake hits Manhattan…again. Once is enough for me.