The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : And now, a quake rumour

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 09, 2005

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

And now, a quake rumour

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, JAN.8. Many a time during periods of crises, the rumour mills work overtime. The tsunami tragedy was no exception. The Director of the National Geophysical Research Institute, V. P. Dimri, received a telephone call from Bidar around 11 p.m. on Friday seeking to know if the town was likely to be rocked by an earthquake.

The caller told him that many people in the town had come out of their houses following a " prediction" that a quake would occur anytime between 7 p.m. on Friday and 7 a.m. on Saturday. He informed the NGRI chief that the Bidar's Municipal Commissioner had advised him to contact the former.

The Director immediately checked with the seismic observatory located on the institute's campus and found that no earthquake or even a foreshock had occurred. He told the man, "one Mr. Khan," that nobody could "precisely predict" an earthquake and asked him to tell people to return to their houses.

Meanwhile, the NGRI observatory recorded three aftershocks of the magnitude of above five up to 10.30 a.m. on Saturday since midnight. While two of them occurred in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (5.1 at 5.10 a.m. and 5.4 at 10.30 a.m.), third one in Sumatra (5.7 at 7.40 a.m.).

So far 148 aftershocks of five magnitude on the Richter scale and above had occurred in the Andaman and Nicobar islands and 80 in Sumatra since the December 26 earthquake, he added.

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