Quake shakes nerves of locals

The 5.8 earthquake centered in Virginia that struck on Tuesday afternoon rocking the nation’s capital was also felt by those up the Eastern seaboard and into Canada.Many in Lynn and Boston felt the quake that had fire departments including Lynn’s scrambling.Lynn District Fire Chief Lee Oliver said, “We got a number of calls and as a precaution dispatched engine companies to call locations including 130 Neptune Boulevard (Neptune Towers) and 330 Lynnway (The Clock Tower Building). There were no reports of any structural damage but we’ll continue to monitor it.”Mary Clutchey of Lynn, a planner with the state Department of Conservation and Recreation in Boston, said she was meeting on the seventh floor of DCR’s leased nine-story office building on Causeway Street in Boston when the quake struck at about 1:50 p.m.”I felt a vibration and it almost seemed like the bookcases in the room were moving. It wasn’t strong enough to be absolutely sure of what you felt, but enough for a colleague to say get down under the table,” Clutchey said. She and others in the building left immediately after the trembler, she said.Jhovanny DeJesus, a resident of South Street Court, Lynn, said he was in his wood-frame home when it shook.”My daughter and I felt it,” DeJesus said, adding his son was also home at the time. “I made some calls and checked to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.”Cindy Doucette, an East Lynn resident, said, “I was sitting in my recliner. I felt it moving but I wasn’t rocking. I thought it was my granddaughter playing a joke.”Other Lynn residents had a stronger experience, as they were visiting closer to the epicenter.The quake rattled James Cowdell, executive director of the city’s Economic Development and Industrial Corp., who is in Washington, D.C. to attend a federal conference. Having just arrived at his hotel, which is located one block from the White House, Cowdell said the building all of a sudden “shook violently.””My first thought was since I was so close to the White House, that it was some type of terrorist attack,” Cowdell said. “I called the operator (at the hotel) and said what was that? And she just said, you need to get out of here immediately.”Once outside, Cowdell said the scene resembled “something out of a movie” as people quickly flooded the streets in a confused sense.”I couldn’t call anybody because my phone wasn’t working,” Cowdell said. “I seriously thought the building was collapsing?I had never felt an earthquake before.”Item sports editor Steve Krause was visiting Civil War battlefields in Pennsylvania when the quake hit.”We were sitting in the Gettysburg diorama when the ground shook pretty intensely for about 10 seconds,” he wrote in an email, adding he first thought it was part of the show. “Then it just stopped. We are fine, but cell phone service knocked out,” Krause said.The epicenter was reportedly 87 miles south of Washington, D.C. in Mineral, Va., not far from Richmond.Airports in New York, New Jersey and Washington evacuated control towers for a period during which no planes were landing during that time.The Pentagon and U.S. Capitol buildings were evacuated for a time following the quake.A CNN reporter at the Pentagon said there were initially many people inside the building in fear given the terrorist attack 10 years ago.Damage was reported at the National Cathedral in Washington and all of the federal historic attractions in the Capital were shut down for the day after the quake.The extent of damage near the epicenter was still being assessed Tuesday night.Experts say damage from earthquakes begins at around a magnitude of 5 on the Richter Scale – each point on the scale is 10 times more powerful. Following the Haiti earthquake in January 2010, Dr. John Ebel, professor of Geophysics at Boston College, told The Item that quakes of the magnitude of 5 or higher hit New England every 50 or 60 years on average. The last was centered near Ossipee, N.H. in 1940.The most severe earthquake ever recor