Rare earthquake in Australia sparks panic in Melbourne

A rare earthquake rocked southeast Australia early Wednesday morning, shaking buildings, tearing down walls and sending panicked residents running onto the streets of Melbourne.

The quake struck east of the country’s second-largest city just after 9 a.m. local time (2300 GMT) and was felt hundreds of kilometers away.

The US Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 5.8 and was later revised to a magnitude of 5.9 and said it struck at a depth of 10 km.

Ruins littered the roads in the popular shopping district around Chapel Street in Melbourne, with bricks, apparently, from the buildings.

Zumi Faim, 33, owner of Melbourne’s Open Café, said he rushed into the street when the quake struck.

“The whole building was shaking. All the windows and the glass were shaking like a shaking wave,” he told AFP.

“I’ve never experienced that before. It was a little scary.”

Large earthquakes are unusual in populated southeastern Australia.

“It was very violent but everyone was in shock,” Parker Mayo, a 30-year-old cafe worker in Melbourne, told AFP.

Bricks and rubble lay on the floor outside my Melbourne burger house, with large metal plates hanging from the restaurant’s canopy.

The restaurant said in a Facebook post that everyone was fine: “We were lucky because there was no one in the restaurant at the time.”

– ‘Very disturbing event’ –

This was the “largest event in southeast Australia in a long time”, with its magnitude below six on the Richter scale, University of Melbourne geologist Mike Sandiford told AFP.

“We had some very large six-degree projectiles in the late 19th century, although the exact amounts are not well known.”

He said that an earthquake of this size is expected every 10-20 years in southeastern Australia, the latest being Thorbdale in 2012. “This is much bigger.”

Australians should expect “several hundreds of aftershocks, most of which are below the human sensitivity threshold, but perhaps a dozen or more will be felt in the vicinity at least,” Sandiford said.

He added that the earthquake “would have caused billions of dollars in losses had it been under Melbourne’s rule.”

Geosciences Australia said aftershocks with a magnitude of 4.0 fell shortly after the initial quake.

The mayor of Mansfield, near the epicenter, said there was no damage in the small town, but it surprised residents.

“I was sitting at work at my desk and needed to run outside. It took a while to figure out what it was,” Mark Holcomb told ABC Public.

“We don’t have earthquakes that I’m aware of – none of the locals I spoke to this morning had that experience with earthquakes here before – so it’s one out of left field.”

Emergency services said they had received calls for help as far away as Dubbo, about 700 km from the epicenter, with fire and rescue teams being sent to help.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, speaking from New York, said there were no initial reports of injuries.

“It can be a very disturbing event for an earthquake of this type,” he said. “It’s a very rare occurrence in Australia.”

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