All shook up
Area residents recount their tales of Tuesday’s 5.8 magnitude earthquake, By Nancy Kriz Chester resident Diane Koblish never expected her family vacation to Virginia Beach, Va., would include experiencing the biggest earthquake to hit the East Coast since 1944. And being only 75 miles from its epicenter in Mineral, Va., Koblish probably experienced the biggest jolt out of most people who live in surrounding Orange County when the 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck at 1:51 p.m. on Tuesday. “We are about an hour drive from Richmond, Va.,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Photo News late Tuesday. “I was in the house and looking out the window and my balance felt off. I looked over at the TV and it was moving back and forth, the lights were moving. Everyone in the house said, 'Did you feel that?’ It took a minute or so to realize what it was. “We had military helicopters fly over the house after the earthquake,” Koblish added. “We were a little nervous because we are on the ocean. We didn’t know if the waters are going to be affected.” According to the U.S. Geological Survey, shaking was reported as far north as Toronto, west to Chicago and northeast into New England. Though the Monroe-Chester-Woodbury-Tuxedo areas are about 375 miles from Mineral, many residents were among the 12 million people along the Eastern Seaboard to become frazzled. Some did, others did not “My office is the attic and it was rocking,” said the Rev. Alon White, pastor of Grace Episcopal Church in Monroe. “I said to myself, 'I know that feeling.’ I grew up in California and should be used to earthquakes.” Though school won’t open until Sept. 6, White quickly called next door to neighboring North Main Elementary, wondering if staff also felt the tremors. “Nicole (Michaels, the substitute typist) and I both felt it, but we never said anything,” said secretary Lee Friedman of Monroe. “I was leaning on my desk and it started moving. I thought it was strange because the desk doesn’t have wheels.” Virginia Carey was home on her lunch break from the Monroe Village Hall. “The chair and table were moving. Then I heard the cups tinkling in my cupboard. I thought something was very wrong.” When Carey got back to work she found the staff on the second floor of the Village Hall had grabbed their purses and left. Yet, downstairs, on the ground floor, the employees felt nothing, she said. The New York Times reported the earthquake occurred in a part of Virginia known as an area of geologically old faults, created several hundred million years ago when the Appalachian Mountains were forming.The area has frequent small earthquakes and the largest previously recorded was a 4.8 magnitude in 1875. Chester resident Bob Murphy, a tunnel and bridge agent with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, knows there are faults throughout the region, and quickly named the ones within his Port Authority service area. And on Tuesday, he was at the County Government Center in Goshen to get an update on his commercial driver’s license. “All of a sudden I was in a ditch,” Murphy recounted. “I had stopped my car and parked it, but the car moved, lurched forward. I thought the car was in motion but it wasn’t. It moved tremendously and fell into a rut. I thought it was me making a mistake but apparently it wasn’t.” Jeanette Uhlig of Chester also thought strange things were happening.After parking in the Chester ShopRite parking lot, she, too experienced strange motions. “(It was) like someone was hanging onto the back of my bumper,” she said. “I turned around and no one was there. My sister called and asked 'Are you rocking and rolling? There was an earthquake.’ I had just assumed it was the wind.” Also thinking strange things were happening was Teresa Padilla of Chester, who initially thought it was her six-year-old daughter Ashlee not following directions to stay in “time out” mode. “I thought she had gotten up and snuck around behind me and was shaking my chair,” Padilla said. “I went onto Facebook and saw postings from my Rockland friends about the earthquake. My chair was shaking because of the earthquake. And I was just about to yell at her.” Harriman resident Dottie Galvin thought it was her cat having a scratching fit. “I was sitting on my couch and felt it shaking. I thought it was my cat scratching but when I looked up - my cat was sitting by the sliding glass door. I realized then it might be an earthquake having gone through one in Rockland County. I put on the TV and there it was - an earthquake.” In Central Valley, Cara Aubry-Shea of Monroe, now a senior at Monroe-Woodbury High School, was at work at Aeropostale. “I was in my stock room, sitting on the floor, and the shelves started shaking,” she said. “We thought someone was shaking it, then we thought it was from the construction next door. We asked people on the floor about it and they looked at us like we were crazy.... It was kind of scary to know you were near it.” But like many, her father John Shea, who works for Building Maintenance Service at its corporate office at 11 Penn Plaza in Manhattan, felt nothing. “My office is in the basement,” said Shea. “I’m in the safest basement on the planet. It was no big deal. We were told to evacuate the building, and I’m thinking, 'Yeah, let’s go outside to the street where shards of glass could fall on us.’ We were fine underground. To me, it was nothing. But a lot of people on higher levels had motion sickness, and a friend of mine (who works on a higher floor) went home with a bad case of vertigo.” And others who work in Manhattan expressed relief that Tuesday’s jolt was from an earthquake and nothing more. “I was at my desk, working on my computer, and you just 'felt’ it,” said Beth Finnegan of Chester, who works in midtown for Morgan Stanley on the 34th floor. Outside, the streets were crowded, Finnegan recalled.“They were just packed,” she added. “Everyone was on their cell phones saying, 'There was an earthquake in New York. 5.8.’ It’s wasn’t chaotic though, it was lively. To know it was an earthquake in Virginia was somewhat comforting, compared to a terrorism scenario.” Claudia Wysocki contributed to this story.