Small Earthquake Rattles England
Posted April 28, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Many people were woken up Saturday morning by something that’s pretty unusual for Britain, a small earthquake.
The tremor with a magnitude of 4.7 rattled parts of southeast England bringing down power lines and causing some structural damage to the Kent and Folkestone areas.
Police said they were working closely with emergency crews responding to hundreds of calls.
The good news is officials reported no serious injuries or deaths.
Thousands of homes were affected by the power outage, but luckily it was restored as quickly as possible in the Folkestone and Dover areas.
Residents said the quake hit around 8am and it lasted about 10 to 15 seconds.
“I was lying in bed and it felt as if someone had just got up from bed next to me,” said Hendrick van Eck, a resident of Canterbury.
“I then heard the sound of cracking, and it was getting heavier and heavier. It felt as if someone was at the end of my bed hopping up and down.”
The tremblor had no affect on the Eurotunnel, which runs cross-channel rail services to France from its terminal near Folkestone on the English coast.
A spokesman at Dover, one of the busiest ferry ports in Europe, also said it was operating normally.
“There has been no impact on ferries or on checking in,” he said.
There are thousands of moderate quakes on this scale around the world each year, but they are rare in Britain.
The country’s strongest earthquake took place in the North Sea in 1931, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale.
