Earthquake shakes New York City, New Jersey: Live updates | AP News

The earthquake slowed travel along the East Coast, with some flights diverted and traffic on roads and rails snarled for runway, bridge, and tunnel inspections.

Flights to Newark, New York and Baltimore were held at their origins for a time while officials inspected runways for cracks. At least five flights en route to Newark were diverted and landed at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.

New Jersey Transit’s commuter rail service reported delays of up to 20 minutes because of bridge inspections. Traffic in and out of the Holland Tunnel between Jersey City, New Jersey, and Lower Manhattan was stopped for about 10 minutes for inspections.

New York City’s transit agency reported initial inspections showed no infrastructure damage.

The White House said in a statement that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the earthquake and spoke with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy about the earthquake, offering federal assistance if needed.

Mayor Eric Adams said in a social media post just before noon that preliminary reports “do not indicate major life safety or infrastructure issues from the earthquake.” He said the city is performing thorough inspections of critical areas.

Earthquakes are less common on this side of the U.S. because the East Coast does not lie on a boundary of tectonic plates: Slabs of the Earth’s crust that slide past each other and build pressure when they get stuck.

The biggest quakes usually occur along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which extends through Iceland and the Atlantic Ocean. A plate boundary called the San Andreas Fault stretches through California.

But East Coast quakes can still pack a punch. Compared to the western U.S., East Coast rocks are better at spreading earthquake energy across far distances.

In New York City’s Astoria neighborhood, Cassondra Kurtz was giving her 14-year-old Chihuahua, Chiki, a cocoa-butter rubdown for her dry skin. Kurtz was recording the moment on video, as an everyday memory of the dog’s older years, when her apartment started shaking hard enough that a 9-foot (2.7-meter-tall) mirror banged audibly against a wall.

Kurtz assumed at first it was a big truck going by.

“I’m from Jersey, so I’m not used to earthquakes,” she explained later.

The video captured her looking around, perplexed. Chiki, however, “was completely unbothered.”

At a coffee shop in lower Manhattan, customers buzzed over the unexpected earthquake, which rattled dishware and shook the concrete counter. “I noticed the door trembling on its frame,” said India Hays, a barista. “I thought surely there couldn’t be an earthquake here.”

Solomon Byron was sitting on a park bench in Manhattan’s East Village when he felt an unfamiliar rumble. “I felt this vibration, and I was just like, where is that vibration coming from,” Byron said. “There’s no trains nowhere close by here or anything like that.” Byron said he didn’t realize there had been an earthquake until he got the alert on his cellphone.

“Pretty weird and scary,” Shawn Clark said after feeling the quake in his 26th-floor midtown Manhattan office. He initially feared an explosion or construction accident and went into a hallway to see whether coworkers had felt the vibrations, too.

Everyone was “a little freaked out,” Clark, an attorney, said as he got a coffee – and his bearings – a bit later.

The shaking stirred memories of the Aug. 23, 2011, earthquake that jolted tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada. Registering magnitude 5.8, it was the strongest quake to hit the East Coast since World War II. The epicenter was in Virginia.

That earthquake left cracks in the Washington Monument, spurred the evacuation of the White House and Capitol and rattled New Yorkers three weeks before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The Fire Department of New York said there were no initial reports of damage. New York Mayor Eric Adams had been briefed on the quake, his spokesperson Fabien Levy said, adding, “While we do not have any reports of major impacts at this time, we’re still assessing the impact.”

In midtown Manhattan, the usual cacophony of traffic grew louder as motorists blared their horns on momentarily shuddering streets. Some Brooklyn residents heard a booming sound and their building shaking. In an apartment house in Manhattan’s East Village, a resident from more earthquake-prone California calmed nervous neighbors.

An earthquake shook the densely populated New York City metropolitan area Friday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said, with residents across the Northeast reporting rumbling in a region where people are unaccustomed to feeling the ground move.

The agency reported a quake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8, centered near Lebanon, New Jersey, or about 45 miles west of New York City and 50 miles north of Philadelphia. U.S.G.S. figures indicated that the quake might have been felt by more than 42 million people.