More than 80 New York City buildings were inspected in the hours following the magnitude-4.8 earthquake that rippled through the five boroughs as the city’s 311 system was inundated with reports of shaking homes and cracked facades, city officials said Saturday.
But out of all the inspections conducted by the city’s Department of Buildings Friday, only one vacate order was issued: a school gymnasium on Fountain Ave. in East New York, Brooklyn was cordoned off after cracks were found in the masonry walls.
“It was determined that masonry bricks near the cracks could potentially become dislodged, and that the gymnasium was no longer safe to occupy,” a Buildings spokesman told the Daily News. “As a result, we have issued a vacate order for the gymnasium until repairs can be made.”
The building holds Intermediate School 218 and the School for Classics High School.
“Our engineers did not find any conditions in other areas of the school that were posing a similar hazard, and the rest of the school can still be occupied,” the spokesman said.
The earthquake, which struck New York City at 10:23 a.m., was felt by millions of people from Massachusetts to Maryland and was responsible for more frayed nerves than actual damage. The U.S. Geological Survey said the epicenter was near Whitehouse Station, N.J., about 40 miles southwest of lower Manhattan.
Over 42 million people felt the quake, the USGS said.
Not since a magnitude-5.8 earthquake centered in Virginia in 2011 had such a powerful quake reached the five boroughs. Friday’s trembler was the third worst earthquake to hit the region in 240 years, according to New Jersey state records.
And the earthquake appeared to be the strongest to originate on New York’s doorstep since 1884, when an estimated magnitude-5 earthquake shook under the city.
The city’s 311 system received about 80 calls Friday from concerned building owners fearing that the quake destabilized their properties. Most of the calls came from building owners in Manhattan and the Bronx, the DOB said.
Complaints included reports of new cracks being spotted at 1915 Billingsley Terrace in the Bronx, a building which suffered a massive partial collapse in December as the corner of the building slid off into a pile of debris on the sidewalk.
The new six-inch hairline crack reported by witnesses was on the first floor of the building, but inspectors couldn’t tell if the damage was earthquake related or not. Inspectors did determine that the crack “was not a structural concern” and it “was not posing a hazard to tenants inside the building.”
The DOB ordered the landlord to fix the crack.
The FDNY also responded to dozens of emergency calls related to the earthquake but there were no reports of injuries or structural damage, the department said.
The NYPD used drones and harbor unit boats to inspect city bridges for any potential damage from the quake.
Anyone with concerns about their building’s structural stability following the quake is encouraged to call 311. Damage from the quake might not be discovered in a building for days or weeks afterwards, DOB Commissioner Jimmy Oddo said Friday.
New York is expected to suffer aftershocks in the coming days as well, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At 5:59 p.m. Friday, a magnitude-4 aftershock — estimated to be 10 times less powerful than the morning earthquake — momentarily shook the city.
An estimated 500,000 earthquakes between magnitudes of 2.5 to 5.4 occur across the globe every year.
Since 1950, 40 other earthquakes of magnitude 3 and larger have occurred within 155 miles of Whitehouse Station, the USGS said.
In comparison, the massive earthquake in Taiwan on Wednesday that killed nine, injured nearly 1,000 others and sent buildings teetering to their sides was recorded at magnitude-7.4, about 1,000 times stronger than New York’s.
