Sleeping through an earthquake
I got up on Wednesday morning, (yesterday), having missed the alarm and overslept. Bleary eyed, I went down to the office and started to go through the emails, as usual, (although, to be honest, perhaps a little more dozily than usual). I turned my attention to Facebook and then to Twitter. It was almost an hour and a half later when I got to a couple of tweets from people based here in Bishkek which not only took me by surprise but also woke me up and wiped the sleep from my eyes: “Wow, rocking!” and more prosaically, “earthquake”.
These were posted at about 01:40 in the morning and when I got over the fact that there were people in Bishkek still sitting at their computers tweeting at that time of the night, (when most of us, myself included, were safely tucked up in bed), I started to surf to see what else I could find out about had happened. There were several comments and questions on twitter: what was the magnitude?; where was the epicenter?, (apparently, as well as being felt by night owls here in Bishkek, it was also felt in Osh, Tashkent and Almaty); what next?
The first reports suggested that the quake was centered in Tajikistan, but that was quickly corrected.
The preliminary Earthquake report from the USGS, (United States Geological Survey), who monitor such events said that it was of magnitude 6.2, (although I have seen several reports locally quoting a magnitude of 8! – but that could be based on a different scale of measurement), which would make it the strongest earthquake on the planet during the last week. Many press reports have referred to it as a “powerful” earthquake, and led to an “orange” earthquake alert being issued, another referred to it as ““extremely dangerous shallow earthquake”, although one local news agency quoted an official as saying it was “insignificant”.
It took place at 01:35:40, somewhere in Kyrgyzstan, (40.128N, 71.423E) about 30 kilometers, (about 18 miles), SSE, (south-south-east), of the Uzbek city of Ferghana, in the Ferghana valley. Those coordinates place the epicenter in the Batken oblast, in a fairly remote mountain area near the village Soviet.
There seems to be some doubt about how deep it was, I have seen reports varying from 1 kilometer to 25 kilometers, but the USGS report suggests that it was almost 18 kilometers underground, (that’s just over 11 miles).
According to one witness, a Fellow of the Institute of Earthquake Engineering, it was the strongest earthquake he had ever experienced.
Apparently, when the residents in the center of Tashkent felt the strong tremors, which seem to have lasted for minutes rather than seconds and in some houses cracks of about 7cm had appeared. Many of them ran from their apartments into the streets fearing aftershocks. In 1966, Tashkent suffered a major earthquake which destroyed much of the city.
Indeed, there was an aftershock at about just the same place just over an hour later, but apparently it was much weaker; about magnitude 3-4.
From Batken there were no reports of serious damage or injuries. In Kyzyl Kia, the largest city in the oblast and one of the few places where there are multistory apartment buildings, there were reports that the plaster had fallen in some of the older buildings, but nothing more serious; all the main services, (water, electricity and so forth), were working normally. Even so, many people took to the streets and there was a fear that people might start looting, so the police went on patrol dispersing crowds.
Not everyone was as lucky as Kyzyl kia, however, as eleven villages lost power as a result of damage sustained in the quake. The main Osh-Batken-Isfana road was closed due to a rockfall at four o’clock in the morning, but clearance work meant that it was reopened again after only half an hour.
Presumably all the emergency services were kept busy and out and about responding to such events, which is probably why people couldn’t raise a response when trying to contact their various offices.
.
Me? I slept through it. Or, at least I think I did. I woke sometime around two o’clock, but rolled over and went back to sleep blissfully unaware of anything being awry.
What’s more, no-one else in the office seemed to be aware of what had happened … although one person did say that they had received an SMS about it.
During the day, however, there were lots more press reports of the event … I counted reports on 20 different sites, before I gave up.
It was from reading some of those reports later in the day that we learned that there were in fact casualties. They occurred, not near the epicentre here in Kyrgyzstan but on the other side of the border in Uzbekistan; 13 deaths and 86 people injured.
Here is a report from Youtube:
.
Bishkek