More than 100 requests for help have been made to Victoria state authorities after the quake
A magnitude 6 earthquake was recorded near Melbourne in Australia, the Australian Geophysical Institute said, quoted by Reuters.
More than 100 requests for help have been made to the authorities of the state of Victoria after the strong earthquake, registered earlier today there, writes the Australian edition “Sydney Morning Herald”. 55 of the help signals are in the area of the capital of the state of Melbourne. They concern collapsed chimneys, partial destruction of walls and facades of buildings.
The epicenter was near the town of Mansfield, about 200 km northeast of Melbourne, at a depth of 10 km. There was also a aftershock of magnitude 4.
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Photos and videos on social media showed debris blocking one of Melbourne’s main streets, and people in the northern part of the city said on social media that they were left without electricity, while others said they had been evacuated from buildings.
The quake affected Adelaide, 800 km west of South Australia and 900 km north of Sydney, New South Wales, but no damage was reported outside Melbourne. No casualties were reported anywhere.
No tsunami alert has been issued, the Australian Meteorological Service said.
More than half of Australia’s population of 25 million lives in the south-east of the country, in an area stretching from Adelaide to Melbourne and Sydney.
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“We have no evidence of any serious injuries or worse, and this is very good news. We hope the good news will continue,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Washington. “Earthquakes of this kind can be very alarming. In Australia, they are extremely rare, and I’m sure that’s why people are quite stressed and anxious.”
In the eastern part of Australia, earthquakes are relatively rare because they are located in the middle of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate, according to the Australian Geophysical Institute. Today’s quake was stronger than the deadliest quake in the country’s history, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake in Newcastle in 1989 that killed 13 people.
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