NEW YORK EARTHQUAKE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 99, 21 January 1936, Page 6

NEW YORK EARTHQUAKE

Skyscrapers as Shock

Absorbers

New Yorkers reacted with mixed feelings to the recent earthquake shock which rocked the city and an enormous adjacent area of the Eastern States and Canada.

It came as an unpleasant surprise to them to discover that the gigantic rock on which New York is built is not as stable as they believed, says tbe correspondent of the “News-Chronicle.”

But to offset this alarming discovery was the reassuring fact that no skyscraper was affected by the earth tremors. These soaring monsters of steel and stone, anchored to bedrock, appear to have acted as shock absorbers. Persons in the upper stories of the skyscrapers were unaware of the quake which was breaking dishes and windows in suburban homes. I was in the skyscraper zone when the shocks were felt and I noticed that not even the windows rattled.

These mountainous piles of architecture, together with the network of subways ’that honeycomb the earth, appeared to combine to cushion the jolt. According to engineers no one need be haunted by the nightmare vision of New York’s tall towers collapsing like sandcastles in some future severer quake. What seems to have happened is that the shelf of rock along the St. Lawrence River—or that off the New England coast—slipped, and the readjustment of the earth’s crust caused the ground to tremble throughout 17 Eastern States.

The area affected was bounded by Canada on the north, Baltimore and Washington on the south, and Illinois on the west. No persons were injured in the New York area.