MONROE, CT — A rumbling sound, floors moving beneath people’s feet, a shaking bed and even the feeling of someone running across the roof were among the descriptions of town residents who felt the tremors from an earthquake that shook up the Northeast late Friday morning.
Stories from New York and New Jersey reported the grounding of flights and halting of trains for inspections of any damage from the quake that measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, but there were no reports of major damage.
Monroe also appears to have made it through the earthquake unscathed.
“We have received multiple calls into our dispatch center regarding the recent rumble around 10:23 a.m.,” the Monroe Police Department said in a post on its Facebook page. “This was not caused by any local event and is believed to have been an earthquake. There are currently no reports of damage or any impact on the town.”
Monroe Fire Chief Kevin Catalano said firefighters were not called out to respond to incidents related to the earthquake.
The earthquake created a buzz on the Monroe CT Residents Facebook page as some who felt it posted comments.
Loraine Zeiner was working in the office of her Twin Brook Terrace home when the earthquake hit.
“There was this rumbling noise. Then I felt something,” she told The Sun in a phone interview. “At first I thought, ‘is there a huge truck driving by … when you feel the vibration?’ There’s a tall tree in the back woods that’s ready to come down and I thought maybe that came down.”
“An earthquake is from the ground, but it sounded like somebody was running on the roof. There was a vibration noise,” she added.
Some people described the sound as similar to a low flying airplane or helicopter.
Zeiner looked around, then went back to work. It wasn’t until her brother Allen texted to ask if she heard about the earthquake and sent an article from ABC news that Zeiner made the connection.
“Then I received all these texts and phone calls from people who felt something,” she said.
Town Clerk Vida Stone was working inside her Monroe Town Hall office Friday morning when her chair shook around 10:23 a.m. At first, she thought something was going on in the police station downstairs.
“I felt something,” she said. “My chair moved. The floor literally shook. I called a dispatcher to ask if anything was going on downstairs. I thought he was kidding when he said it was an earthquake.”
“One person called and asked if the blasting started again,” Assistant Town Clerk Tina Reynolds said of a resident who wondered if a developer was doing earthwork on a nearby property. “I said, ‘no, it was an earthquake.'”
Buddy Limbert, of Karen Drive, who was waiting at the counter inside the Town Clerk’s Office, said,”I was lying in bed and my whole bed shook.”
People spoke to friends and relatives who experienced the earthquake in Shelton, North Haven, Trumbull and Norwalk among the many locations that felt tremors.
But not everyone experienced it.
“Tina felt it and I did, but Sue didn’t feel it,” Stone said of Assistant Town Clerk Sue DeGeorge.
All respectful comments with the commenter’s first and last name are welcome.
