“I AM FINE”: This was the Empire State Building’s assertion on X just minutes after a magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocked the New York area for a couple dozen seconds at about 10:23 a.m. on Friday. The epicenter was in New Jersey, about 50 miles west of Manhattan. 

On Montague Street, at Brooklyn Heights, the Sun encountered persons who had rushed out of an apartment building and gathered on the solid sidewalk and begun conversing excitedly about what had just happened. In the West Village of lower Manhattan, the Sun observed people glancing out their windows and even taking to their rooftops, scanning the streets and the skyline for evidence of any damage.  

Emergency alerts electrified cellphones an hour after the earthquake, advising New York City residents to remain indoors and call 911 if injured. Local airports immediately grounded flights as a precaution. The New York Police Department’s chief of transit, Michael Kemper, said there are currently no reports of any structural damage or service disruptions to the NYC Transit system. His office will be surveying all lines and stations.

“It’s been an unsettling day, to say the least,” Governor Hochul said in a statement minutes after the quake. “We’re taking this extremely seriously and here’s why. There’s always the possibility of aftershocks.” The United States Geological Survey calculates a 16 percent risk of aftershocks in the next week.

The tremors might have been felt by more than 42 million people, according to the United States Geological Survey. That makes this the biggest earthquake on the East Coast since 2011, when one of a 5.8 magnitude struck in Virginia and rolled its way up the East Coast, causing disruptions at Manhattan. 

New York state has experienced more than 550 earthquakes, most in the Adirondack Mountain and western regions, since recording began in the 18th century. The largest one reported in the tri-state area was a 5.2 magnitude in 1884, according to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Chimneys were toppled and shocks were felt between Virginia and Maine. 

“Earthquakes don’t happen every day in New York, so this can be extremely traumatic,” Mayor Adams said at a press briefing. He advised people outside during an aftershock to move to open areas away from trees, or to pull over if they are in a car. It’s a reminder, his team said, to “make sure we are prepared.” 

Is New York City prepared?

There are 1.1 million buildings in New York City, Mayor Adams’s office said on Friday. In 1995, the city added earthquake safety provisions to its building code. Further provisions were added after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to strengthen the resilience of buildings and to prevent a full collapse in case of an extreme event. According to the Department of Buildings, skyscrapers must be designed to withstand a certain “wind load.”

In California, a tremor hotspot, some engineers are proposing making buildings less susceptible to swaying in the event of earthquakes. American building codes allow for twice as much drift as those in Japan, where earthquakes are 10 times more common, the New York Times reports. Thousands of buildings in Japan are constructed with rubber foundations and shock-absorbing devices that can cut down the chances of damage and prevent collapse.

Most of the skyline at New York was built before the 1995 safeguards. Many buildings are considered by the city to be “vulnerable” to earthquakes. That might be why residents flocked to the streets and to social media on Friday morning. They sought to confirm that they weren’t alone in experiencing the tremors — and that their concrete jungle would be, as the Empire State Building put it, “FINE.”

Many residents invoked humor to decipher the event. “Did we shake or were we shook?” one X user joked in a post. “We survived the NYC earthquake,” another resident wrote on X, sharing a photograph of an overflowing garbage can knocked over on the sidewalk. “We will rebuild.”