June 24 (Bloomberg) -- A magnitude 5.0 earthquake in Canada shook office towers in Toronto and Montreal, interrupted train service and forced lawmakers and government workers in Ottawa from their buildings.
The earthquake at about 1:41 p.m. New York time today was centered about 53 kilometers (33 miles) northeast of Ottawa, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The tremors were felt as far away as Ohio, New York and Massachusetts, said Bruce Presgrave, a USGS geophysicist in Golden, Colorado.
In Ottawa, several emergency vehicle sirens could be heard downtown, and hundreds of people evacuated buildings in the blocks around Parliament Hill. Mobile phone reception was intermittent in the half hour afterwards and the Bank of Canada was closed. There have been no reports of injuries or major damage.
“I was sitting at my desk when I felt a small shake,” said Kelly Cromwell, a money manager at J. Zechner Associates on the 47th floor of the TD Canada Trust Tower in Toronto’s financial hub on Bay Street. “My chair then started to move to the right, and that’s when I got up and ran to the elevator.”
The earthquake was the strongest in eastern Canada since 2000, when a 5.2 magnitude tremor shook Quebec, according to the USGS and Natural Resources Canada. The Ottawa area is part of the Western Quebec Seismic Zone, which gets three to four earthquakes a year. One of the most damaging quakes in the region occurred in 1935, when a magnitude 6.1 event struck.
Epicenter Motel
“There is no evidence of damages. Picture frames fell and windows shook, but no injuries,” said Linda Léveillé, owner of a motel in Val-Des-Bois, Quebec, about 5 kilometers from the epicenter.
Passenger train service in the triangle between Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto resumed in late afternoon after a three-hour interruption for track inspections, Via Rail spokeswoman Elizabeth Huard said in a telephone interview. Travelers should expect delays of 45 minutes to three hours, she said.
Steve Lee Lalande, a spokesman for the Quebec provincial police, told Radio-Canada television that the belfry in the village of Gracefield crumbled. A portion of Quebec’s route 307 has been closed after collapsing, Nicole Ste-Marie, a spokeswoman for the provincial transport ministry, said in a telephone interview.
Lawmaker Cut Short
Don Davies, a lawmaker with the opposition New Democratic Party, had to cut short an Ottawa press conference on the costs of the Group of Eight and Group of 20 summits in Canada.
“I don’t always exit with such drama,” Davies said after reporters had begun running for the exits as the building shook.
Toronto resident Andrea Ercolani initially mistook the tremor in Toronto for the vibrations from helicopters that had just flown low over downtown ahead of the G-20 summit. Toronto is about 425 kilometers from the earthquake epicenter.
“I was very nervous,” said Ercolani, 26, who works at a food magazine, Inspired. “I’ve never felt an earthquake before.”
Laurent Godin, a professor of structural geology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario who studies faults that cause earthquakes, said he wasn’t surprised there was so little damage reported to date.
Building Codes
“In another country with not as good building codes, there might have been more damage,” Godin said in an interview. “I’ve worked a lot in Nepal and Kathmandu and a 5.5 there would have been a totally different story.”
The tremor comes three days before leaders from the Group of 20 countries converge on Toronto to debate ways of coordinating exit strategies from fiscal stimulus. A 12-block section of Toronto’s financial district is already surrounded by three-meter (10-foot) high chain-link fences and concrete barriers, part of the largest security operation ever in Canada with 20,000 police and security guards.
“We’re thinking of making T-shirts -- I survived the Great Quake and the G-20 in Toronto 2010,” said John Curran, a Toronto-based senior vice president at CanadianForex Ltd., an online foreign-exchange dealer.
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