Rumble in Rockville as Mild Earthquake Hits DC Area

A mild earthquake shook things up at ASPB headquarters on December 9, 2003. From her ground-floor office, Robin Lempert, then the Education Foundation director, reported, “I was sitting here at my desk, minding my own business, and felt the desk and floor move and the windows rattle. So I walked out to the parking lot where [two other staff members] told me they thought it was an earthquake. Sure enough, it was.”

Although some people felt the quake, others seemed to take the slight vibration as among the usual idiosyncrasies of working in a 100-year-old building, where a certain amount of creaking and groaning is expected. John Long, production manager for The Plant Cell, with a second-story office, said, “I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, but I didn’t feel a thing.” At the same time, one floor up on the attic level, George Kendall, managing editor of Plant Physiology, reported, “I was in my office on the phone discussing billing…and the earth moved, literally! The building shook and my computer monitor shook like a bobble-head doll.”

The facts of the matter were announced by a press release from the U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center:

A light earthquake occurred in Central Virginia about 30 miles west of Richmond at 1:59 PM MST, Dec 9, 2003 (3:59 PM EST in Virginia). This was a complex event consisting of two subevents occurring 12 seconds apart. The earthquake was also felt in parts of Maryland and North Carolina. (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/uscdbf.htm)

Earthquakes—at least those severe enough to be felt—are rare in the Washington, DC, area, according to scientists who were interviewed for the many newspaper accounts of the quake. Articles from the Washington Post and local Virginia papers that covered the quake can be found through links at the Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program web site: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/. Fortunately, this earthquake was more of a novelty and did not result in any injury to the staff or damage to the building.