Community Corner

Neighbors Scurried While Greenbelt Shook

Workmen on roofs ran for open space, some residents hunkered down in doorways, while others had no concept of what was happening when tremors struck Greenbelt after a 5.9 magnitude earthquake hit Virginia Tuesday.

Dioniceo Romero and Enrry Flores were working on the housetops of 1 Northway a little before 2 p.m., Tuesday, when the roofs beneath them started shaking.

Lilian Osei was in bed and thought her neighbors were making a lot of noise. She recalled her bed feeling like it was floating on the sea.

At work, her husband, James, who is employed by Amtrak, was on a stationary train that was anything but still. He feared it would fall off the track — people started running.

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Derek Skaggs was in his townhome on Ridge Road and had no idea what was happening. Being in the construction business, the first thing he thought was that people were working below his home and hadn’t told him.

They must have jacked his home up and dropped it, he figured. He was upset; they should have let him know they were there. “Enough is enough,” he recalled thinking.

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“Ding, ding, ding,” went the grandfather clock in Shayna Skolnik’s home on Northway. It kept chiming and the neighborhood dogs were “barking like crazy,” she said. Skolnik ran for a doorway.

Frantically calling from work, Sarah Schellin, couldn’t reach her husband, Dan Fischler. The phone lines were crossed. She kept getting someone else. Inside their new home on Hillside, Dan tried calling out on his cell phone; it didn’t work.

Back on Northway, Romero said he and the other men working on the roofs knew immediately it was an earthquake. He was no stranger to the shaking. He just never expected it to catch up with him here.

As an adult, he had returned home to El Salvador for a visit, when an earthquake hit. He recalled mudslides, toppling buildings and big chunks of mountains coming down.

Those buildings had been made of concrete, which didn’t sway like the wood homes here, he said. When they shook; they fell.

Romero said he and the workmen with him knew right away what they were supposed to do. As a child in El Salvador, he had gone through school drills that trained him how to react. They all took off for open space.

By this time, Skaggs had figured out no one had dropped his home. Now he thought a truck must be driving by outside. His house was shaking so badly that he wondered, “How big could the truck be?”

When the walls started moving in Lilian’s home, she realized this was not just a noisy neighbor. As fear shot through her, she grabbed her cell phone and dialed her son’s daycare. She couldn’t get through.

Back at Amtrak, James said he heard, “Bam, bam, bam,” as the train teetered from side to side. Following suit with the others, he began running.

Then, after about 45 seconds — that seemed to have invaded from an alternate universe, Greenbelt stopped shaking, walls stood in one place, noises subsided.

In my neighborhood, we stepped outside. Some of my neighbors and I uttered the words earthquake. We stared at each other.

I wondered — how? In Greenbelt?

I went inside to grab a few things, and soon ventured outside again to see how others beyond my neighborhood had fared. I caught up with the shaken but standing, as they walked the byways of Greenbelt or stood outside their homes with the gilded sun streaming in stark contrast to the day.

They eagerly shared their stories. Lilian stopped to talk about her gratitude to God, while she and James picked up their daughter, Janay, from Greenbelt Elementary School. Skolnik, who had checked on the roofers shortly after the tremors subsided, suggested I talk to them. She translated their words to English, so others could know their story.

As I snapped photos, almost everyone was smiling. The smiles seemed weird juxtaposed against the fear and shaking we had all just endured. I asked Skaggs to think about what he’d just been through while I took his picture. He tried and succeeded, briefly, before a sudden smile broke out on his face.

Eventually, I realized this wasn't about posing for the camera. No, from Skaggs to Skolnik, with her children sitting peacefully in their stroller, to James standing by his daughter coming safely home, to Romero, eager to share his story while Skolnik gladly translated — they were smiling to be alive, after having had the ground shake their lives so vigorously in front of their eyes on Tuesday.


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