When a rumbling reverberated throughout the Northeast, residents unfamiliar with earthquakes struggled at first to place the shaking.
Was it just vibrations from the subway? Construction? Some sort of car crash? Was it all in their heads?
In Whitehouse Station, N.J., just a few miles from the earthquake’s epicenter in Lebanon, Valorie Brennan heard a rumbling that sounded like a train, before she felt any shaking.
“I thought my furnace exploded,” she said, adding, “My dogs went running to the back of the house to hide.”
Frantic phone calls, a torrent of social media posts and an official emergency alert confirmed that the vibrating was, indeed, a magnitude-4.8 earthquake.
For many in the area, where significant quakes are uncommon, it was the first they recalled experiencing.
Ada Carrasco has lived in Marble Hill, in the Bronx, for 10 years and said she had never felt an earthquake.
She was in her third-floor apartment, washing dishes when it happened. “I felt it but at first, I thought to myself ‘Am I getting light-headed?’” she said in Spanish on the stoop of her apartment building. “Then the shaking continued and I ran out the door.”
It was also a first for Julia Gottlieb, 26, who lives in Crown Heights, in Brooklyn. She was working from home and guessed the tremor was caused by construction outside her building.
“Maybe that they were drilling too close,” she said.
But in a city teeming with transplants and tourists, some said they knew immediately what the quiver was.
Noga Hurwitz, who moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York for college in 2019, said she was working from her girlfriend’s apartment in Manhattan when she first felt the shaking.
Years of earthquake preparedness training from kindergarten and from her father, a geologist for the United States Geological Survey, kicked in, she said. They stood in a bedroom doorway, as she had been taught as a child (a practice that experts generally don’t advise anymore).
“It felt very intuitive,” she said, recalling the rattling picture frames and getting stuck on a roller coaster in Disneyland during some of the earthquakes she experienced growing up.
In a city whose rumbles, belches and roars normally don’t set off much alarm, she said her co-workers and friends all initially guessed that the tremor was nothing out of the ordinary in New York: something falling off an apartment building; the washing machine that rattles their apartment; roadside construction.
“There’s so many noises in New York, that I think no one’s intuition was that it’s an earthquake,” she said.
Grace Rhee, 39, was riding the Long Island Railroad with her 14-month-old son, Victor, when shaking began. Ms. Rhee, who lives in Los Angeles and works for a tech company, is in New York City visiting family.
“It’s ironic that I came here and felt an earthquake,” she said.
Was she nervous to board the subway after the minor quake? Hardly. “I’m from California. That’s nothing more than a sneeze out there.”
And before long, the city had returned to its raucous self.
Mike Irizarry, 56, a retired hair stylist who was on the subway during the earthquake and said he felt nothing, was not hesitant to get back on the train afterward.
“Look, after 9/11 and everything else,” he said, “That doesn’t scare me.”
Erin Nolan, Camille Baker and Liset Cruz contributed reporting.
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