Quake Rattles Pittsburgh
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Caution tape surrounds the apartment building in Pittsburgh's Marshall-Shadeland neighborhood after bricks fell from a chimney during Tuesday afternoon's earthquake.
The bricks smashed onto a picnic table a short distance from a 6-year-old boy.
In Bellevue, chunks of stone shook loose from a chimney and smashed onto a driveway.
And it was a similar story in Brighton Heights on California Avenue. Anita Bandy was inside when the quake shook her home. "I could hear the whole building creaking," said Bandy. "Didn't know what it was. We ran outside and saw people looking up and come to find out the bricks are falling off the chimney!"
In downtown Pittsburgh, people evacuated skyscrapers. "I could hear the blinds shaking in the other room, and I said 'This is an earthquake! We have to get out of here!" said Dawn Owen.
Sirens went off on the Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus, and people left buildings. Anthony Kuta, who is a junior, didn't know what to make of it. "I really didn't know what was going on," said Kuta. "Everything was shaking."
An Excela Health office building in Jeannette was evacuated, and people inside the Westmoreland County Courthouse in Greensburg also felt the rumble. One woman said it felt like her chair was shaking back and forth.
"It probably lasted 10, 15, 20 seconds depending on where you were at," said Lou Coban from the Allegheny Observatory on Pittsburgh's North Side. They have two seismographs and showed KDKA's David Highfield what the quake looked like.
Coban also felt the tremor. "Oh yeah. We felt it pretty good here. There was like a low rumble and the building was like swaying back and forth a little bit," said Coban.
A little over a year ago, people on Pittsburgh's South Side and in Oakland felt an earthquake centered in Canada, near Ottawa.
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