All across the DC region, authorities are still picking up the the pieces from Tuesday’s historic east coast earthquake. Schools were closed across the region Wednesday and the Washington Monument is shut down while authorities examine several cracks caused by the quake.
The National Cathedral is among the DC landmarks to have suffered the most from the quake, and staff at the site say it will be a while before things are back to normal.
Though the huge church is extremely new as cathedrals go — the last stages were completed in 1990 — it was built using the same methodology as cathedrals across Europe. That means stone-on-stone construction, which creates a brittle, inflexible structure not exactly designed to sway with the rolling ground in an earthquake.
And so the National Cathedral took its licks Tuesday afternoon.
The cathedral “sustained substantial damage,” staff said in a web posting Wednesday.
An accompanying video interview with Cathedral Mason Foreman Joe Alonso explained that damage assessment is still underway, and their are worries that the cathedral’s vaulted ceilings and central tower are damaged.
“Cracks have appeared in the flying buttresses around the apse at the Cathedral’s east end, the first portion of the building to be constructed, but the buttresses supporting the central tower seem to be sound,” the staff said in a press release.
There’s already a fundraising effort underway to raise money to repair the Cathedral.
