5.8 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Louisa, Virginia, Home of the North Anna Nuclear Power Plant

Nuclear Plant Loses Electricity in Temblor

August 24, 2011

Wall Street Journal - Tuesday's 5.8-magnitude earthquake created a state of emergency at the North Anna nuclear-power station in central Virginia, causing it to lose electricity and automatically shut down, although generators restored power.

The North Anna Power Station declared an "alert" status, which is the second lowest of four emergency situations.

Jim Norvelle, director of media relations for Dominion Resources Inc., operator of the North Anna plant, said its workers inspected the switch yard, through which electricity enters and leaves the installation, and believe problems there caused the nuclear plant to lose access to grid power. When the plant lost access to grid power, it automatically shut down.

Mr. Norvelle said the four diesel generators at the plant, 40 miles northwest of Richmond, can furnish enough electricity to run vital safety systems indefinitely at the two-reactor site. Electricity is needed to keep the reactor cores covered with coolant and to keep safe temperatures in spent fuel pools. Problems in both those areas led to the near-meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, following a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

It will be at least several days before the North Anna plant is returned to service, the company said. First, workers must make sure there was no earthquake damage. That requires a thorough inspection of many systems. Then a slow and orderly process is followed to return reactors to service.

"As far as we know, everything is safe," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman David McIntyre.

Twelve additional nuclear plants in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina and Michigan declared "unusual events," the lowest of four emergency situations. They included Calvert Cliffs, the closest nuclear plant to Washington, D.C. The plant remained stable at 100% of capacity, said Mark Sullivan, a spokesman with Constellation Energy Nuclear Group LLC, which owns the plant.

The Calvert Cliffs plant is in Lusby, Md., about 50 miles from the city limits of the nation's capital.

Mr. Sullivan said that as part of normal procedure, employees were performing increased observations and instrumentation monitoring.

Meanwhile, at the Indian Point nuclear-power plant north of New York City, officials said some minor shaking was felt, but the facility was still online and operating at full power.

Update; D.C. Earthquake: Spires Damaged, Buildings Shake

Washington Monument Tilting Due to DC Earthquake:


The rare earthquake that rattled the US east coast yesterday has cracked the top of the iconic Washington Monument, prompting officials to close the building indefinitely.

August 23, 2011

AP - The most powerful earthquake to strike the East Coast in 67 years shook buildings and rattled nerves from South Carolina to Maine on Tuesday. Frightened office workers spilled into the streets in New York, and parts of the White House, Capitol and Pentagon were evacuated.

There were no immediate reports of deaths, but fire officials in Washington said there were at least some injuries.

The National Cathedral said its central tower and three of its four corner spires were damaged, but the White House said advisers had told President Barack Obama there were no reports of major damage to the nation's infrastructure, including airports and nuclear facilities.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake registered magnitude 5.8 and was centered 40 miles northwest of Richmond, Va.

Two nuclear reactors at the North Anna Power Station, in the same county as the epicenter, were automatically taken off line by safety systems, said Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The earthquake came less than three weeks before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and in both Washington and New York it immediately triggered fears of something more sinister than a natural disaster.

At the Pentagon, a low rumbling built until the building itself was shaking, and people ran into the corridors of the complex. The shaking continued there, to shouts of "Evacuate! Evacuate!"

The Park Service closed all monuments and memorials on the National Mall, and ceiling tiles fell at Reagan National Airport outside Washington. All flights there were put on hold.

In lower Manhattan, the 26-story federal courthouse, blocks from ground zero of the Sept. 11 attacks, began swaying, and hundreds of people streamed out of the building.

The New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, was in a meeting with top deputies planning security for the upcoming anniversary when the shaking started. Workers in the Empire State Building spilled into the streets, some having descended dozens of flights of stairs.

"I thought we'd been hit by an airplane," said one worker, Marty Wiesner.

Another, Adrian Ollivierre, an accountant, was in his office on the 60th floor when the quake struck:

"I thought I was having maybe a heart attack, and I saw everybody running. I think what it is, is the paranoia that happens from 9/11, and that's why I'm still out here — because, I'm sorry, I'm not playing with my life."

New York District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance was starting a news conference about the dismissal of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, when the shaking began. Reporters and aides began rushing out the door until it became clear it was subsiding.

On Wall Street, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange did not shake, officials said, but the Dow Jones industrial average sank 60 points soon after the quake struck. The Dow began rising again a half-hour later and finished the day up 322 points.

In Washington, the National Cathedral said cracks had appeared in the flying buttresses around the apse at one end

. "Everyone here is safe," the cathedral said on its official Twitter feed. "Please pray for the Cathedral as there has been some damage."

Shaking was felt as far south as Charleston, S.C., and as far north as Maine. It was also felt on Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, where Obama is taking summer vacation and was starting a round of golf when the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. EDT.

Obama led a conference call Tuesday afternoon on the earthquake with top administration officials, including his homeland security secretary, national security adviser and administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

By the standards of the West Coast, where earthquakes are much more common, the Virginia quake was mild. But quakes in the east tend to be felt across a much broader area.

"The waves are able to reverberate and travel pretty happily out for miles," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough.

More than 12 million people live close enough to the quake's epicenter to have felt shaking, according to the Geological Survey. The agency said put the quake in its yellow alert category, meaning there was potential for local damage but relatively little economic damage.

The USGS said the quake was 3.7 miles beneath the surface.

The last quake of equal power to strike the East Coast was in New York in 1944. The largest East Coast quake on record was a 7.3 that hit South Carolina in 1886. In 1897, a magnitude-5.9 quake was recorded at Giles County, Va., the largest on record in that state.

A 5.8-magnitude quake releases as much energy as almost eight tons of TNT, about half the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The earthquake that devastated Japan earlier this year released more than 60,000 times more energy than Tuesday's.

The Virginia quake came a day after an earthquake in Colorado toppled groceries off shelves and caused minor damage to homes in the southern part of the state and in northern New Mexico. No injuries were reported as aftershocks continued Tuesday.

On the East Coast, Amtrak said its trains along the Northeast Corridor between Baltimore and Washington were operating at reduced speeds and crews were inspecting stations and railroad infrastructure before returning to normal.

In Charleston, W.Va., hundreds of workers left the state Capitol building and employees at other downtown office buildings were asked to leave temporarily.

"The whole building shook," said Jennifer Bundy, a spokeswoman for the state Supreme Court. "You could feel two different shakes. Everybody just kind of came out on their own."

In Ohio, where office buildings swayed in Columbus and Cincinnati and the press box at the Cleveland Indians' Progressive Field shook. At least one building near the Statehouse was evacuated in downtown Columbus.

In downtown Baltimore, the quake sent office workers into the streets, where lamp posts swayed slightly as they called family and friends to check in.

Around Mineral, Va., a small town close to the epicenter, people milled around in their lawns, on sidewalks and parking lots, still rattled and leery of re-entering buildings. There was least one aftershock.

All over town, masonry was crumpled, and there were stores with shelved contents strewn on the floor. Several display windows at businesses in the tiny heart of downtown were broken and lay in jagged shards.

Carmen Bonano, who has a 1-year-old granddaughter, sat on the porch of her family's white-frame house, its twin brick chimneys destroyed. Her voice still quavered with fear.

"The fridge came down off the wall and things started falling. I just pushed the refrigerator out of the way, grabbed the baby and ran," she said.

Twitter and Facebook lit up with reports of the quake.

"People pouring out of buildings and onto the sidewalks and Into Farragut Park in downtown DC," Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, posted on Twitter.

John Gurlach, air traffic controller at the Morgantown Municipal Airport in West Virginia, was in a 40-foot-tall tower when the earth trembled.

"There were two of us looking at each other saying, 'What's that?'" he said, even as a commuter plane was landing. "It was noticeably shaking. It felt like a B-52 unloading."

Immediately, the phone rang from the nearest airport in Clarksburg, and a computer began spitting out green strips of paper — alerts from other airports in New York and Washington issuing ground stops "due to earthquake."

Magnitude 5.8 Quake Shakes East Coast

August 23, 2011

Los Angeles Times - A powerful earthquake rattled Washington, D.C., today, prompting evacuations of the Capitol, the Pentagon and many other area office buildings.

Authorities said the quake was 5.8 on the Richter scale, and the epicenter was near Fredericksburg, Va. Early reports said the quake was felt up and down the East Coast.

That appears to be the largest quake on record for this area. Before today, the largest occurred last July, a 3.6 quake that hit near Rockville, Md., according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The North Anna nuclear power plant is located near the quake’s epicenter in central Virginia, northwest of Richmond.

The quake shook the New York Stock Exchange and early reports suggest it was felt as far north as Toronto.

On Capitol Hill, alarms sounded, lights flashed and staffers were ordered to evacuate office buildings.

"I'm feeling homesick,'' said Jeffrey Solsby, a congressioanal staffer and native Angeleno, said from the parking lot outside his House office building. He described the evacuation as orderly.

He saw sections of plaster that had cracked in stairwells.

"I could see dust stirred along the train tracks that run through southwest Washington."

"Considering it feels exactly like Southern California, I suppose you call call this East Coast earthquake weather."

"A couple of people were in doorframes. But the first instinct was surprise because you just really don't expect earthquakes in this araa ... but I'll tell you having lived through Sept. 11 here ... knowing it is an earthquake, it takes away the uncertainty of Sept. 11 that was so prevalent.''

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) tweeted:

"My DC staff describes remarkable shaking of the Rayburn Bldg.''

Seismologist Lucy Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN that the quake was,

"Not completely unprecedented, but it's one of the largest that we've had there."

“I would think that leaking gas and the risk of fires would be very significant,” Jones said.

Quake Rocks Washington Area, Felt on East Coast

August 23, 2011

AP - A 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered northwest of Richmond, Va., shook much of Washington, D.C., and was felt as far north as Rhode Island, New York City and Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where President Barack Obama is vacationing.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was half a mile deep. Shaking was felt at the White House and all over the East Coast, as far south as Chapel Hill, N.C. Parts of the Pentagon, White House and Capitol were evacuated. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

It was centered near Louisa, Va., which is northwest of Richmond and south of Washington.

Obama and many of the nation's leaders were out of town on August vacation when the quake struck at 1:51 p.m. EDT. The shaking was felt on the Martha's Vineyard golf course as Obama was just starting a round.

The East Coast gets earthquakes, but usually smaller ones and is less prepared than California or Alaska for shaking.

At Reagan National Airport outside Washington, ceiling tiles fell during a few seconds of shaking. Authorities announced it was an earthquake and all flights were put on hold.

At the Pentagon in northern Virginia, a low rumbling built and built to the point that the building was shaking. People ran into the corridors of the government's biggest building and as the shaking continued there were shouts of "Evacuate! Evacuate!"

In New York, the 26-story federal courthouse in lower Manhattan began swaying and hundreds of people were seen leaving the building. Court officers weren't letting people back in.

The quake came a day after an earthquake in Colorado toppled groceries off shelves and caused minor damage to homes in the southern part of the state and in northern New Mexico. No injuries were reported as aftershocks continued Tuesday.

In Charleston, W.Va., hundreds of workers left the state Capitol building and employees at other downtown office buildings were asked to leave temporarily.

"The whole building shook," said Jennifer Bundy, a spokeswoman for the state Supreme Court. "You could feel two different shakes. Everybody just kind of came out on their own."

In Ohio, where office buildings swayed in Columbus and Cincinnati and the press box at the Cleveland Indians' Progressive Field shook. At least one building near the Statehouse was evacuated in downtown Columbus.

In downtown Baltimore, the quake sent office workers into the streets, where lamp posts swayed slightly as they called family and friends to check in.

Social media site Twitter lit up with reports of the earthquake from people using the site up and down the U.S. eastern seaboard.

"People pouring out of buildings and onto the sidewalks and Into Farragut Park in downtown DC...," tweeted Republican strategist Kevin Madden.

"Did you feel earthquake in ny? It started in richmond va!" tweeted Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group.

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill tweeted that her staff in Washington was in an "emergency location. Hope everyone is ok."

John Gurlach, air traffic controller at the Morgantown Municipal Airport was in a 40-foot-tall tower when the earth trembled.

"There were two of us looking at each other saying, 'What's that?'" he said, even as a commuter plane was landing. "It was noticeably shaking. It felt like a B-52 unloading."

Immediately, the phone rang from the nearest airport in Clarksburg, and a computer began spitting out green strips of paper — alerts from other airports in New York and Washington issuing ground stops "due to earthquake."

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