Videos of unusual earthquake that shook New York, one of the largest of the last century

An unusual earthquake of magnitude 4.8 occurred this Friday, April 5, around New York, causing slight tremors for a few seconds in numerous neighborhoods of the Big Apple and interrupting a meeting of the UN Security Council on Gaza, according to It can be seen in the videos that have circulated due to the telluric movement.

The earthquake occurred at 9:23 in the morning “7 kilometers northeast of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey”, the border state of New York, on the other side of the Hudson River, and at a depth of 5 kilometers, according to the United States Geophysical Institute (USGS).

No significant damage or injuries were immediately reported.

The slight tremor was felt in numerous neighborhoods in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyncausing an avalanche of messages on social networks.

Dominika Uniejewska, a store manager in Lebanon, New Jersey, the epicenter of the earthquake, told AFP that she “was asleep” when the quake hit. “At first I didn’t understand what was happening because I had never experienced such a strong earthquake.“.

“The whole house was shaking a lot, the bed was shaking and it was making noise, a very loud noise,” he said.

President Joe Biden was informed of the event, according to his spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, and “the White House is in contact with federal and local officials.”

“I’m fine,” the account of the iconic Empire State Building said in X.

City residents posted photos of overturned lawn chairs with a tongue-in-cheek message: “We will rebuild it.”

But authorities urged caution. “We have no information at this time about significant damage (but) we continue to assess the situation,” Fabien Levy, spokesman for New York Mayor Eric Adams, wrote on X.

At United Nations headquarters, cameras filming a Security Council meeting on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza began to shake.

The representative of the NGO Save the Children, Janti Soeripto, interrupted a speech in which he talked about famine and deaths. “Is it an earthquake?” she asked.

The meeting was suspended for a second time when phones began ringing and vibrating due to automated emergency alerts sent.

The American Civil Aviation Agency (FAA) warned that airports in the Northeast could encounter difficulties, mentioning those in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Baltimore, Maryland.

But New York’s JFK airport reported in X that it was still “open and operational” and that “planes are taking off and landing.”

“Earthquakes are rare, but not impossible, along the Atlantic coast, a region called by geologists ‘passive-aggressive margin’ to describe the area where the Atlantic plate and the North American plate meet,” according to the USGS.