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Tuesday's 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia should shake Westchester residents free from any sense they are safe from temblors, said the author of a forthcoming book about earthquakes in New York.
"I'm certainly concerned," said Julia Kagan, a science writer who grew up in Tarrytown and graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School. She has a Manhattan apartment and a house in the Hudson Valley near Germantown.
Kagan referred to the safety of people in homes and buildings not constructed to be earthquake proof, and in proximity to the Indian Point nuclear reactors. "The plant was built at the confluence of two active seismic zones and at a time when we, in this area, did not factor in seismologic data as we know we need to do now," Kagan said today in a telephone interview.
Westchester residents felt tremors generated by the Virginia quake as a result of the Earth's rigid crust along the East Coast, Kagan said.
"It's more solid than on the West Coast, where the broken rock dissipates some of a quake's energy," she said. "So people in this part of the U.S. can feel a quake at a greater distance, over a much wider band, from its epicenter."
Kagan said she worries about the welfare of Westchester residents given that the Indian Point nuclear power plant sits at the intersection of two active seismic zones, as detailed in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America in 2008.
A braid of small fractures, known as the Ramapo Seismic Zone, runs from eastern Pennsylvania to the mid-Hudson Valley, while a set of northwest-southeast faults runs east and south of the Ramapo zone on the Peekskill-Stamford line.
In addition, there is a Dobbs Ferry fault in Westchester, which generated one of the area's largest recent earthquakes, a magnitude 4.0 at 6 a.m. on Oct. 19, 1985. The epicenter was Ardsley. Until Tuesday, that was the largest magnitude earthquake in recorded history for the metropolitan area.
The original 40-year operating licenses for Indian Point's two reactors expire in 2013 and 2015. The Entergy Corporation, operator of the reactors, is asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to extend the licenses for another 20 years. It's a political hot potato and one that gets bandied about whenever Mother Nature rears up.
"The 1985 quake inspired me to write this book," Kagan said. "I had thought New York City and the surrounding area were safe from quakes. I was wrong."
Westchester and Hudson Valley residents need to be prepared, Kagan said. "Make sure that structures are built to code and earthquake proof," she said. "Families with children, in particular, should be aware of what can fall off walls, tables and shelves, like bookcases and televisions, and should bolt them down or otherwise anchor them."
Everyone should know what to do in an earthquake, Kagan said. "You're generally safer lower down," she said. "That's why today, people on higher floors in office buildings and stores, for example, may have felt tremors, while people on the ground floors in the same buildings may have felt nothing."
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