Wednesday, August 24, 2011
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Workers at at the Oakhill Renaissance Building in downtown Youngstown were evacuated after reverberations from a 5.8-magnitude earthquake with an epicenter in Virginia.
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Scaffolding workers at the PNC Bank Building in downtown Youngstown said they felt the shaking of the earthquake from Virginia, but elected to keep working.
By Karl Henkel
YOUNGSTOWN
Jenifer Miller said it felt like a roller coaster.
“I was working on the computer, and it actually felt like the floor was moving,” said Miller, secretary to the director of science, technology, engineering and math at Youngstown State University. “I almost fell out of my chair.”
Miller, of course, was talking about the aftereffects of a 5.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked Virginia at 1:51 Tuesday afternoon and caused evacuations at the Capitol, White House and Pentagon.
Just minutes later — depending on location — the effects of the same earthquake shook the Mahoning Valley for about 60 seconds.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injury in the Valley, though many residents reported feeling the same reverberations as Miller.
At the PNC Bank Building in downtown Youngstown, two scaffolding workers standing on the roof said they felt the earthquake about 2 p.m., but that didn’t deter them from continuing with their work.
Inside the building, Jeff Thomas said he didn’t feel the earthquake.
“I don’t know if I was in between being outside or if I was inside,” Thomas said. “I didn’t feel it. I just read about it online.”
The county-owned Oakhill Renaissance Place, evacuated last summer after reverberations from a 5.0-magnitude earthquake in New York, was evacuated for about 45 minutes, said Robert E. Bush Jr., director of Mahoning County’s Department of Job and Family Services.
County facilities workers inspected the main complex, parking deck and a separate freestanding building and found no signs of damage.
Irene Petrelis, receptionist in the recycling division’s third-floor Oakhill office, said she felt two separate vibrations less than 10 seconds apart, each lasting three to four seconds.
“I was checking something on my computer, and I felt my chair moving, and I actually thought somebody came up behind me and was pushing me, so I turned around, and nobody was there,” she said of the first vibration.
The J.C. Penney store in Eastwood Mall in Niles also was reportedly evacuated briefly, a mall official said.
The vibrations were felt as far away as Columbus, said E. Mac Swinford, assistant state geologist with the Ohio Division of Natural Resources, who said Midwest’s geological makeup allowed for widespread aftereffects.
“The nature of the geology of the Midwest is that it is uninterrupted bedrock units, so the energy travels great distance unlike California, where the rocks are all busted up and the energy lessens quickly,” Swinford said.
Jeffrey Dick, geology department chairman at YSU, said it is difficult to determine the exact cause of Tuesday’s earthquake.
“You can’t really pin it down on a day,” Dick said. “What you’re looking at are ancient fault lines, between 600 million and 1.5 billion years old. They represent weaknesses in the rocks, and over time stresses build up and the rocks move.”
A 5.8-magnitude earthquake isn’t rare — several thousand occur annually — but the epicenter, in Fredericksburg, Va., made it a bit more unique. Swinford said that if the same earthquake had centered in Ohio, it would have bested the previous record of 5.4 set in 1937.
Also unique: It was the second earthquake that impacted the Valley in two days.
A small, 2.2-magnitude microearthquake centered near Salt Springs Road and Meridian Road on Youngstown’s West Side occurred at 8 a.m. Monday morning in almost the same location as the 2.6-magnitude earthquake from March 17, the first recorded earthquake with an epicenter in Mahoning County.
Contributor: Staff writer Peter H. Milliken