News

Hawkinge residents were awoken to a violent shaking of their homes when a rare, moderate earthquake shook households in southeast England at 8.18am this morning (28 April).

The 'quake toppled chimneys alarming residents, authorities said, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

A spokesman for Kent's Fire and Rescue Service said they had received around 100 calls, with people complaining that "their chimneys have fallen down (and) large cracks in people's houses."

Sky News television reported some witnesses saying that they had been evacuated from their homes by the Salvation Army and that their gas and electricity supplies were cut off.

According to the United States Geological Survey, the quake measured 4.3 on the open-ended Moment Magnitude scale which is now used by US seismologists.

A spokesman for the British Geological Survey added it was the largest in Britain since a tremor in the West Midlands in 2002.

Hendrick van Eck, 27, from the city of Canterbury, said that the tremor lasted just a few seconds.

"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," he said.

Sharon Hayles, from the nearby village of Stanford, said it felt like "the whole house was being slid across like a funfair ride."

And Paul Smye-Rumsby, from the port town of Dover, told BBC radio: "Suddenly the bed shook violently. I thought my wife had got cramp or something but then I saw the curtains were moving and the house was shaking. It lasted about 1.5 seconds."

The epicentre of the tremor, which the US Geological Survey said occurred at 8:18 am local time (0718 GMT), was located 15 miles south of Canterbury.

The depth of the epicentre was put at 7.1 kilometres (4.4 miles).

Randy Baldwin, of the US Geological Survey, told BBC television that the quake was "fairly light," adding that there had been two or three others in the area over the last decade which were "somewhat smaller" than Saturday's.

A spokesman for Eurostar, which links Britain to continental Europe by rail via the Channel Tunnel, said that services at the Ashford terminal in Kent, near where the quake hit, were unaffected.

There were reports that the quake was felt up to 100 miles away from its epicentre in other southern English counties such as Essex, East Sussex and Suffolk.