Syracuse, NY--Here's what some local people said they felt when the earth moved at 1:41 p.m. today. “My whole chair was moving,” said Evonne Everson, an underwriting assistant at the Medical Liability Mutual Insurance Co. in the Atrium building in downtown Syracuse. “My soda was moving like this,” she said shimmying her hand. The quake moved chairs and rattled bookcases...
Syracuse, NY--Here's what some local people said they felt when the earth moved at 1:41 p.m. today.
“My whole chair was moving,” said Evonne Everson, an underwriting assistant at the Medical Liability Mutual Insurance Co. in the Atrium building in downtown Syracuse. “My soda was moving like this,” she said shimmying her hand.
The quake moved chairs and rattled bookcases in the Atrium, other workers said.
National Grid workers taking a break in Clinton Square said they felt the floor shift in their offices in the company’s building a couple of blocks away on Erie Boulevard.
Rob Halbohm, who works for the USDA National Resources Conservation Service, had been in the men’s room at the Galleries, when he felt the quake.
“It felt like the floor in the building was gently shifting,” he said. “I thought someone was walking by rolling heavy machinery.”
Halbohm said he didn’t think anything about his experience until he heard people around Clinton Square talking and he put two and two together to come up with earthquake.
Mary Beth Paul was handling reception duties in the County Attorney’s Office on the tenth floor of the Civic Center when the building shook about 1:45 p.m.
“I thought someone was shaking the back of my chair,” she said. But when she turned to look, there was no one behind her.
People throughout the office started coming out to ask what was going on, she said. Paul said it seemed that people who were on their feet did not notice the shaking, but it was very noticeable to people sitting down when it occurred.
Paul said the shaking seemed to last about a minute. She immediately called downstairs to the front desk to see if something had happened in the building. The people at the desk on the ground floor didn’t feel the tremor, she said.
People briefly evacuated three floors of the Gridley Building between Clinton and Hanover squares in downtown Syracuse, said Joseph Callahan, a lawyer with offices there. People could hear plaster falling but there was no discernible damage there, he said.
North Syracuse Mayor Diane Browning was working on her computer in Village Hall when she saw the screen shake.
"My screen was moving just very gently," Browning said. "Then I could feel the floor under my feet, just very gently. At first I thought maybe somebody was downstairs was drill or piece of machinery. I hollered out and said, ‘Are we having an earthquake?’¤"
No one else at Village Hall seemed to notice.
"They all ignored me," Browning said. "I thought I was losing my mind."
Milton Johnson, an operator at Onondaga County’s Oak Orchard Road Wastewater Treatment Facility in Clay, said he was working at his computer when the console started shaking.
“I looked over and the other console was shaking,” he said. “We looked at each other thinking somebody did something.”
Johnson then called his wife, Agi, at home to Marietta. “She didn’t feel anything,” he said.