New York City's disaster management authorities set out to inspect for damage within minutes of an earthquake that slammed the Northeast on Friday morning, according to Jackie Bray, the commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and disaster Services. The earthquake struck the Northeast.
She stated that in accordance with the emergency operations plan of the state, structural engineers from the state and the city were promptly dispatched to assess bridges, tunnels, and other essential infrastructure.
Additionally, nuclear facilities were obligated to report any damage within fifteen minutes. According to Bray, they did not discover anything material.
It is nevertheless important, according to the experts, to think about the things that could have gone wrong. In a statement, Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, who is the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, stated that "these are important teachable moments for what-ifs and what would we do if it was worse."
Schlegelmilch, who has written two books about disaster preparedness, stated that earthquakes are "not prioritized as highly as other scenarios on the East Coast and as you might see in more seismically active areas like the West Coast and countries like Japan."
He said this in reference to the fact that earthquakes are not so highly prioritized. "There are plans in place and efforts being made to plan, but obviously the ones that we get hit with more frequently, such as coastal storms and extreme weather events, are typically more front of mind," the speaker said.
They were caught off guard by the earthquake that occurred on Friday, which had its epicenter close to Lebanon, New Jersey. When asked about the weather, Bray responded, "It's not like a blizzard in Buffalo, right, that you know you're going to have every year." An earthquake in New York is not something that is expected.
Nevertheless, the state and the city have implemented earthquake-specific measures, such as adopting building codes that require new buildings or buildings that are undergoing significant renovations "to be built to the appropriate seismic standards," as stated by Bray.
"This ensures that we are ready for whatever may occur in the event that it does occur." Despite the fact that New York City and other large urban regions in the Northeast have, for the most part, embraced the most recent seismic building standards suggested by the American Society of Civil Engineers, such codes are not universally applicable.
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