Earthquake shakes State Department and diplomatic community
The 5.9-magnitude earthquake that shook Washington on Tuesday afternoon sent State Department employees scurrying and caused some foreign diplomats to bond together as they evacuated their embassies. The State Department daily press briefing was just finishing up when reporters and staff assembled in Foggy Bottom’s State Department media room saw the podium shake. The rumbling ...
The 5.9-magnitude earthquake that shook Washington on Tuesday afternoon sent State Department employees scurrying and caused some foreign diplomats to bond together as they evacuated their embassies.
The 5.9-magnitude earthquake that shook Washington on Tuesday afternoon sent State Department employees scurrying and caused some foreign diplomats to bond together as they evacuated their embassies.
The State Department daily press briefing was just finishing up when reporters and staff assembled in Foggy Bottom’s State Department media room saw the podium shake. The rumbling sent some of the younger press corps members scrambling for shelter, while others, such as your humble Cable guy, held their ground unfazed.
After a few moments of shaking and swaying, the State Department remained intact. The building management staff immediately began searching for damage, but it was not clear whether some early evidence, such as cracks in the stairwells, came from today’s earthquake or was there already. Dozens of State Department employees assembled outside at the entrance at the intersection of 23rd and C streets.
"No formal State Department evacuation was called — diplomacy must go on — but some employees did evacuate voluntarily and temporarily. The building and annexes are being checked now for damage," spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told The Cable.
Some State employees did take advantage of the earthquake to call it a day and go home. One civil service officer we met called her boss from her cell phone, leaving him a voice mail to say that she needed to take the rest of the day off to check on her dogs in her apartment.
"I can’t be in an environment where I’m feeling so much anxiety," she told The Cable, before hopping in a cab.
Meanwhile, several embassies around Washington did actually evacuate. Many of these embassies have strict contingency plans for emergencies, and those plans were implemented because it wasn’t immediately clear why the ground shook in Washington.
Embassies in Washington are often clustered together, so the result of the evacuations was that several impromptu gatherings of diplomats from different countries broke out on the streets of Washington, with chance interactions between envoys representing countries that probably wouldn’t talk to each other much in regular circumstances.
For example, in the Van Ness neighborhood, there was a meeting on the street between diplomats evacuated from the embassies of Israel, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as they all waited for the all-clear sign.
"Israel and China were never so close as today after the earthquake," an Israeli official said.
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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