"Like A Wave Of Shaking": Rare Earthquake Jolts Australia's Melbourne

Sydney/Melbourne: A rare quake rattled southeastern Australia early Wednesday, shaking buildings, demolition walls and sending panicked residents running into the streets of Melbourne The shallow quake hit east of the country’s second-largest city just after 9:00am civil time (2300 GMT) and was felt many kilometres (miles) away.

The US Geological Survey put the magnitude of the quake at 5.8, later revised up to five .9, and said it struck at a depth of 10 kilometres (six miles) Debris littered roads within the popular shopping area around Melbourne’s Chapel Street, with bricks apparently coming loose from buildings Zume Phim, 33, owner of Melbourne’s Oppen cafe, said he rushed onto the road when the temblor hit.

“The whole building was shaking. All the windows, the glass, was shaking — sort of a wave of shaking,” he told AFP.I haven’t experienced that before. it had been a touch bit scary Sizable earthquakes are unusual in Australia’s populated southeast It was quite violent but everyone was quite in shock,” Melbourne cafe worker Parker Mayo, 30, told AFP.

Bricks and rubble lay on the bottom outside Betty’s Burgers in Melbourne, with large sheets of metal hanging off the restaurant awning The restaurant said during a Facebook post that everybody was safe: “We were fortunate that no-one was within the restaurant at the time.”

‘Very disturbing event’

At around slightly below magnitude six this was “the biggest event in south east Australia for an extended time” Mike Sandiford, a geologist at the University of Melbourne told AFP We had some very big ones at magnitude six within the late 1800s, though precise magnitudes aren’t documented .”

A quake of this size is predicted every “10-20 years in south east Australia, the last was Thorpdale in 2012” he said. “This is significantly bigger Sandiford said Australians should expect “many many aftershocks, most below human sensitivity threshold, but probably a dozen or more which will be felt a minimum of nearby.”

The quake “would have caused many billions of dollars in damage had it been under Melbourne,” he added Geosciences Australia said an aftershock measuring 4.0 struck shortly after the initial temblor The mayor of Mansfield, near the quake epicentre, said there was no damage within the village but it had taken residents all of sudden .

“I was sitting down at work on my desk and that i needed to run outside. It took me a short time to figure out what it had been ,” Mark Holcombe told public broadcaster ABC We do not have earthquakes that i’m conscious of — none of the locals I spoke to the present morning had that have with earthquakes here before — so it’s one right out of left field.”