Kyle Guest was asleep in his house in Chancellorsville, Va., when a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck at about 2 p.m. Tuesday.
“I woke really easily — right away when I felt a shaking,” said Guest, a senior economics and environmental thought and practice double major at the University of Virginia.
“My whole room started shaking pretty violently for about 10 seconds. I didn’t know what was going on. It felt like a spaceship
was landing in my house.”
Although most students at UNC barely felt the earthquake, at the University of Virginia, several buildings were evacuated after students and faculty felt the ground trembling.
Tremors stemming from the earthquake could be felt throughout the Eastern United States, including the Carolinas.
While the shakes went unnoticed by many at the University, Randy Young, Department of Public Safety spokesman, said he did receive a couple of concerned 911 calls.
No injuries were reported as a result of the earthquake, but it damaged three of the four spires on the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., according to McClatchy reports.
Cory Morton, a student at George Mason University, said he saw the damages done to the 20th century landmark while on his way home from work.
“I was biking by the National Cathedral and did get to see the spires that were collapsing,” he said.
“They had everything roped off. There were a lot of people crowded around looking at it.”
Morton said he spoke to people within the city who had even scarier experiences.
“I talked to people who were on the ninth floor of a building who said that it was knocking books off the shelves, shaking the chandeliers, moved their desk six inches,” he said. “So the higher floor they were on, the more violent shaking there was.”
Earthquakes, while not very common along the Atlantic Coast, are not unheard of, said Jonathan Lees, a professor in the department of geological sciences at UNC.
“A 5.8 — that is pretty big for this part of the world,” he said.
The tremors felt throughout the Eastern United States and parts of Canada were a result of the terrain.
“Because the rocks are very old and very competent, the waves travel very efficiently,” Lees said.
Earthquakes on the East Coast tend to travel further than earthquakes that occur in the West, he said.
Lees said the aftershocks, which are smaller earthquakes that usually follow the main shock, will continue to occur throughout the next few months.
Lees and some of his fellow UNC colleagues are organizing equipment to record data from these aftershocks.
