Petworth Residents Say Metro is Causing Mini-Earthquakes in Houses

Steve Burns
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Metro’s Green Line has run underneath Northwest D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood since 1999, but only this past summer did Bill Alexander and his neighbors start feeling a rumble every few minutes.

“We didn’t know what it was. We thought maybe it was construction going on somewhere,” Alexander tells WMAL. “The windows shaking, mirrors falling off the walls. The stove will shake when trains go by.”

In talking with his neighbors, Alexander says, they concluded it has to be Metro. The rumbling happens regularly from 5am to 1am, he says, and less often over the weekend – closely resembling Metro’s operating hours and train frequencies.

“It’s a rumbling you won’t believe,” he said. “When we first heard it, we thought it was another earthquake like the earthquake we had a few years ago.”

Nobody knows of a confirmed reason as to why the rumbling only started this summer, Alexander says, but one hypothesis brought up centers around Metro’s new 7000-series trains, which tend to be louder than older trains.

Alexander says a Metro engineer visited his house late last summer with a seismograph and concluded the rumbling was Metro-related.

“He said, ‘Yeah, it’s the train. We’re going to pass it on to the next department,'” Alexander says. “We really never heard much after that.”

Metro, however, disputed that finding in a statement to WMAL.

“Metro is looking into the issue,” the statement read. “The source of reported noise/vibration has not been determined, or even confirmed as Metro related at this point.”