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After quake, Capitol returns to normal

by Josiah Ryan - 08/24/11 3:05 PM ET

The Capitol campus returned to the quiet pace of recess in Washington on Wednesday morning following the 5.8-magnitude earthquake that rattled the city Tuesday afternoon.

“I came to work this morning just like any other day,” Sgt. Kimberly Schneider of the Capitol Police assured The Hill. “We are fully staffed and it’s a normal day at the Capitol.”

{mosads}In a city where a terrorist attack seems far more probable than a major earthquake, a feeling of relief seemed to pervade among staffers, federal employees and reporters returning to their desks Wednesday morning.

“I am relieved,” said one staffer. “As the shaking got harder I assumed it was a bomb going off. It was a violent, violent tremor. I then thought the whole building was going down, that a bomb had gone off in the basement.”

Several others in the building said that as the gentle rolling in the first few seconds of the quake turned to shaking they also assumed the Capitol campus was under attack.

Despite the quake’s magnitude, however, the office of the Architect of the Capitol (AOC) told The Hill Wednesday morning that a thorough assessment by structural engineers revealed only superficial damage, including cracked plaster and dust that had rained down from ancient ceilings.

Workers labored throughout the night to repair almost all of that damage by morning, said Eva Malecki, who is communications officer for the AOC.

Both the Capitol Police and the AOC told The Hill that, in many ways, the earthquake served to prove that their emergency response systems are set for any surprise crisis that may strike.

“Everything went very smoothly and basically according to plan,” said Malecki. “You hate when things like this happen but it proved to us our plans are spot-on and that we were completely ready.”

Perhaps the event from Tuesday that will be most remembered in history was the Senate pro-forma session that was moved from the Capitol to the Postal Square Building next to Union Station.

The session, presided over by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), is believed to have been the first official non-ceremonial gathering of the Senate held outside of the Capitol since the British burned it during the war of 1812, Katherine Scott, an assistant Senate historian, told The Hill.

Meanwhile, inhabitants of surrounding neighborhoods might have noticed Tuesday night that the Capitol dome was not illuminated as usual. That darkness, however, was just a part of the return to normalcy, said the AOC.

“I believe Pepco [a local power supplier] had work they had scheduled to do and so they decided to do it despite the earthquake,” said Malecki.