Earthquake stories: ‘It was like a suspension bridge swaying’

Debra Ricci was behind the wheel of her car when she realized that something was just not right.

“I had pulled over to make a phone call when the car started swaying. At first, I thought it must just be really windy, but then I realized my windows were open and there was no breeze,’’ the Stoughton resident said.

“It was like a suspension bridge swaying. I thought at first that maybe they were doing construction under the street or something, but I didn’t see anything. The car felt like it was rolling,” she said.

Ricci finished her phone call and resumed driving.

“I was about a mile down the road when I heard on the radio there had been an earthquake,’’ she said.

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In Roxbury, 88-year-old Sylvia Vales said she knew immediately what was going on. The native of Jamaica knew just as quickly that she was not impressed.

“I felt the ground shake. I knew it was an earthquake, because I know what an earthquake feels like,’’ Vales said. “I am from the islands. I am from Jamaica.’’

Vales said that the movement of the earth did not move her.

“I didn’t do anything after I felt it,’’ she said. “I just kept walking. It wasn’t that bad.”

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In downtown Boston, panic took hold on Devonshire Street, where a crowd of about 50 gathered on a sidewalk and looked up, pointing cellphone cameras toward the sky. The 100-year-old Minot Building fell forward during the earthquake, people said, and now it leaned on the glass skyscraper next door.

“There always used to be air between the two buildings,” said Jackie Ecker, 45, who works on the 18th floor of the glass structure at 50 Milk St. “When you look up [now], it’s actually pitched to the left and leaning up against the other building.”

The crowd quadrupled. Sirens wailed. Several fire trucks rushed to the scene and cleared the sidewalk, stringing yellow caution tape across the street. Top city officials – Fire Commissioner Roderick Fraser, Donald McGough, director of emergency properness – walked the few blocks from City Hall.

But inspectors and engineers quickly realized what the Minot Building manger Gary Morris knew all along.

“It’s always been like that,” Morris said. “Nothing happened. There is still a gap between the buildings.”

Since the skyscraper at 50 Milk St. was building in the 1970s, there has always been a gap of 3/8 of an inch. That gap remained.

“There’s no indication of any kind of collapse or any movement,” said Deputy Fire Chief Richard DiBenedetto. “No structural integrity has been compromised.”

The fire trucks left the scene. The yellow caution tape came down. But the crowd remained, pointing at the sky, and reliving the moment for television cameras, photographers, and newspaper reporters.

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At Quincy Market in downtown Boston, Kristin Andreotes was eating her salad in the outside patio of Kingfish Hall when her “chair started to shake. ‘’

“It felt like someone was grabbing it and swaying it back and forth,’’ said the senior project director at The Ad Club of Boston, an ad industry group in Boston.

“It wasn’t a big motion. The table stayed in place but my body could feel the shake. I am used to feeling that when the [MBTA] subway is running underground.”

She didn’t think much of the rattling until minutes later when she and her six fellow office workers received text alerts about an earthquake. They were all surprised.

Nearby at Boston ad agency Mullen in downtown, workers also felt rumbling in their offices just before 2 p.m.

“It felt like the wind was causing the building to sway a little bit,’’ said agency spokesman David Swaebe. “The window shades were moving around and the light fixtures were intermittent. Most of the people in the building felt it. Everyone came out of their offices and asked if someone else had felt it.”

Staffers there thought the shaking were related to road construction outside the firm until they learned from news reports of the earthquake which was also felt at the agency’s other offices in Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem, N.C.

Mullen employees in Boston didn’t evacuate, but Swaebe said that several hundred fellow staffers at the agency’s sister Interpublic Group office in Manhattan did.

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Michael Campion, who was at work at the Lafayette Corporate Center in Downtown Crossing, thought the shaking from the earthquake was caused by movement from the Red Line.

“But it lasted about a minute and it was much stronger than the occasional movement from the subway,” he said. “The water in my glass sealed it for me, that this was not normal, when it, too, was swaying.”

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Noelle Fair was at work in New York City.

“It just kind of felt that I lost my balance for a minute,’’ said Fair, who works in catering.

When she lost her balance, people attending the event she was working at got up and headed for the door -- only to discover the elevator wasn’t working.

Fair’s parents live in the Washington DC area, and she said she happily discovered they were unharmed, she told the Globe.

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On the North Shore, it wasn’t the earth moving that freaked Martha Lewis out.

“My computer was vibrating on my desk. I thought that was odd,’’ said Lewis, who is the executive secretary for Beverly Mayor Willliam Scanlon Jr. “It was kind of crazy. I had no idea what it was until someone else had read it online that there as an earthquake in Virginia.”

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The Boston Fire Department dipped deep into its code book when it got calls from people fearing that the building at 111 Devonshire Street in downtown Boston had tipped over. (It hadn’t.)

“Those who listen to BFD on scanners heard an unusual code for some responses this afternoon,’’ the department said on its twitter page. “The 811 code is for an Earthquake Assessment.’’

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Dale Freeman, a digital archivist at UMass Boston’s Joseph P. Healey Library in Dorchester, was at his desk when the quake hit. He first noticed his computer screen shaking and then heard sounds from above him, almost as though mice were scurrying through the ductwork.

“I had never known a rodent problem in the archives, ever, and I was like, ‘What is that tapping?’” Freeman, 49, said by phone this afternoon. “And I just realized at that point I could hear the book stacks kind of moving a bit.”

But what alarmed Freeman most was when he noticed the door to the archives vibrating back and forth about an inch.

“No alarms had gone off, but I just figured it would be a smart thing to evacuate right away,” Freeman said.

DeWayne Lehman, spokesman for UMass-Boston, said summer classes were cut short and all workers were sent home early after the tremors rattled nerves on the Dorchester campus.

“Many people left the buildings spontaneously,’’ he said.

Lehman said people gathered on the school’s soccer fields while UMass Boston public safety officials made sure the buildings had been safely evacuated.

Lehman said the campus buildings, most of which were completed in 1974 and are built on reclaimed land, are being inspected by facility managers as a precaution.

He said the school expects to reopen Wednesday.

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Law clerks working on the eighth floor of the John J. Moakley federal courthouse in South Boston said they were stunned and confused by the late afternoon earthquake.

David Seligman, was in the law library when he felt the building start to shake. At the same time, the hanging lights began to sway.

“I was pretty sure I was having a panic attack,’’ he said. “I felt like I needed to get out of my chair and I thought about leading everyone to the door because I heard that’s the safest place to be.’’

A third law clerk, 26-year-old Erin Philips, said her computer keyboard started to move by itself.

“I felt like I was losing my mind or having vertigo,’’ she said.

Other people reported seeing office furniture move, and when the order to evacuate was given, she quickly heeded instructions, she said.

“I was very nervous,’’ she said.

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