Music executive Shanti Das was high up on a New York City rooftop when the earth beneath her unleashed a loud roar and the building shook as if it were having a seizure. Almost a thousand miles to the south in Mooresville, N.C., Janice Stephenson Harper was gripped with fear when the rumbling ground violently interrupted the flow of her day. And several hundred miles west of Harper, in the city of Akron, Ohio near Cleveland, Tommy Johnson explained the frightening episode as almost surreal and definitely eerie.
“Just experienced an earthquake in N.Y. [and] I knew it wasn’t right,” Das explained. “The whole building shook. So scary. I am safe, thank God.”
Apparently, an earthquake with the magnitude of 5.9 originated beneath the earth in Virginia that reverberated hundreds of miles in every direction. Meteorologists said tremors shook the ground as far south as the Carolinas, as far west as Ohio and as far north as New York and into Toronto, sending millions of shocked workers and residents scrambling for cover – and had their brains scrambled as they tried to inventory what they just witnessed.
“I sat in shock as the floor was shaking at the office,” said Royce Lewis, a New Castle, Del., resident who works in the City of Brotherly Love. “Still trippin … not in Philly! We closed shop for the day.”
Radio personality Porsche Foxx waxed philosophically about the far-reaching earthquake since it happened on the eve of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Dedication week in Washington.
“I find this not only bizarre but mind boggling that something like this would happen on opening day of the King Monument in D.C. . Do you think Dr. King all while appreciative of the gesture is terribly displeased with the suicide of the DREAM!!!,” Porsche Foxx asked on Facebook. “I FEEL HIM TURNING IN HIS GRAVE.”
Johnson, a former Ohio native who lived in California before moving back, testified that the reverberations from the Virginia earthquake could be felt deep into the Midwest. “Yes we all felt a little earthquake. Just a little something to make me miss California more,” he said from Akron, adding: “If it happens again this week I will officially hit the panic button!”
Retha Davis of Apopke, Fla., echoed Johnson’s sentiments when she proffered this biblical explanation: “It’s the sign of the times,” she said.
– terry shropshire
