Credit: Daniel Amburg/Fort Dix Training Support Center
A house-rattling boom rocked the Levittown area in the early morning hours on Sunday.
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Local and county emergency officials weren’t clear the cause, but said it wasn’t related to any incident in Bucks County. One local fire official said the boom was loud enough to wake their entire family and also shake the glass on display cases in their living room.
Social media posts on neighborhood pages in Bristol Borough, Bristol Township, Falls Township, Middletown Township, and beyond featured numerous posts about the boom that happened just before 2 a.m.
“I thought my husband fell out of bed. Seriously I ran upstairs to check with him,” one local wrote on social media.
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“Holy s**t!! Was it construction, an explosion, or a sonic boom?” one Bristol Borough resident asked LevittownNow.com.
“Usually we think fireworks because it’s Levittown, but that shook the entire house and woke my son up,” another reader said.
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“Scared the crap out of me n my dogs. I thought someone drove into my house bc the house shook,” one person said on Facebook.
The U.S. Geological Survey did not report any earthquakes in the region Sunday morning.
One situation that could have caused the noise and rattling of homes was early morning training at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, which sits about 13 miles as the crow flies from the Levittown area.
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Spokespeople for the 42,000-acre military complex in the sprawling New Jersey Pinelands did not respond to a request for comment Sunday morning.
A noise calendar put out recently by the base said Saturday was expected to feature “heavy crew weapons training and cratering munitions.” The training was planned to have included mortar live fire, howitzer fire, and cratering charges.
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Mike Lee, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s regional office, told LevittownNow.com there was not any weather events early Sunday that have been reported that would have caused the noise. However, he said the high pressure over the area creates good conditions for noise to travel far distances, but he was not aware of the training schedule for the base.
Much of the Levittown area – stretching mainly from Route 1 to the Delaware River – sits in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. In the past, experts have said the soil type and flat landscape means sounds can travel easily from the base to Lower Bucks County.
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The Levittown area has heard rumbles and booms from training at the military complex in the past.
The joint base is planning more high noise training in two weekends.
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