Tremors shake Germantown Avenue and beyond, but don’t cause much concern

When it came to Germantown Avenue, some people felt this afternoon’s earthquake while others didn’t.

At Rothe Florists in Mt. Airy, Herb Rothe was among the former while his co-worker Jennifer was not.

“My first thought was that a big truck was going through on the avenue, but then it occurred to me that there was no big truck outside,” he said. “The lamp on my desk was moving, rocking side to side. Then, the computer monitor tilted down all my itself so I knew something was going on, wondered if it was an earthquake.”

Minutes later, he walked up to Valley Green Bank and when he saw everybody outside of Northwest Human Services talking about it, he knew.

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Eleven blocks away at the Nile Café, Michelle Johnson said nobody in the restaurant felt anything, but that people upstairs in their apartments did. The same held true at Park Manor Deli on West Chelten Avenue where an employee didn’t notice anything but the owner upstairs, Mrs. Kim, “thought someone was banging a nail through the building.”

Natasha Fairfax, who was working the Trolley Car Diner counter at the time, said, “A few dishes shook, and I shook a little when I was sitting on the bench. We didn’t feel too much.”

At Diane & Tom’s Café on Maplewood Mall, Tiffany Pye said she was sitting down and “felt the building shake back and forth three times. I thought I was crazy, but then I felt it again. It made me nauseous.”

When she asked co-workers whether they felt anything they, too, deemed her crazy (or at least jetlagged having just returned from a trip to Hawaii), but when people called in talking about the earthquake, Pye was validated.

Meanwhile, in East Falls, no cases fell at East Falls Beverage beer distributors, but they were off-centered after about 10 seconds of swaying on Ridge Avenue. There are apartments upstairs, so employee Monika Maslany assumed someone was “running up and down the stairs above me. … It was a very strong sensation. I’m still shaken up by it,” she said an hour later.

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