Inspections found a crack at the top of the monument, a park service spokesman said. The earthquake didn't cause widespread damages or injuries, but it did put a crack in the Washington Monument.

The Washington Monument suffered significant cracking primarily due to a 5.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Virginia on August 23, 2011. While the monument is built to withstand strong winds and thermal expansion, the unique seismic waves of that particular earthquake caused the top of the 555-foot structure to whip back and forth with immense force. Because the monument is essentially a giant "dry-stack" masonry structure (the stones are held together mostly by gravity and some mortar), the intense shaking caused the marble blocks near the pyramidion (the pointed top) to shift and grind against each other. This resulted in several large through-cracks and hundreds of smaller "spalls" or chips of marble falling both inside and outside the monument. The cracks were particularly severe at the very top, where the structure is thinnest and the "whiplash" effect was most pronounced. A massive $15 million restoration project followed, involving the use of specialized stainless-steel plates to reinforce the stone and hand-injected "gravity-fed" epoxy to seal the cracks. While the monument was built with three different types of stone over 36 years, it was the 2011 earthquake that revealed the vulnerability of its massive masonry design to seismic activity.