Kent hit by 4.2 earthquake

An earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 shook windows and caused walls to creak when it struck in the early hours of Friday in Kent, England.

No injuries or damage to buildings were reported following the tremor four miles (7km) south of Ramsgate at 2.52am, Kent Police said.

More than 800 “felt reports” were received by the British Geological Survey (BGS), mainly from residents in Ramsgate, Margate and surrounding areas.

But the BGS said reports of the earthquake were also received from as far afield as Norwich, North Walsham and Cromer in East Anglia.

Locals described the earthquake as feeling as if a vehicle had been driven into their property.

One thought their hotel door was being kicked in, another described their house creaking, while a third said the tremor sounded like a “heavy object rolling over the roof of the house”.

In Ramsgate, Muni Prasad (42) said: “We were woken up suddenly. For a few seconds the property was moving. In my daughter’s room, books had fallen down.

“She came to our room and said ‘Did you feel it?’. And we said we had. We are on the second floor so when a big vehicle goes by, we sometimes feel it. But with this my wife said it felt like something different.”

Bob Fludgate said: “I was woken up in the early hours as if a lorry had hit the house.”

Sarah Luddington said: “I was in bed and I went downstairs because I thought something had smashed into the house, like a car or something.

“It was awful but there was no damage. I could feel everything shaking. Everyone else was asleep, it was just me. It was scary.”

Kent has been at the centre of tremors before. In April 2007, a magnitude 4.3 earthquake hit Folkestone, causing cracked walls and fallen chimneys at dozens of buildings.

The British Geological Survey said earthquakes similar in size to the one that struck this morning happen around every two years in the UK and about 4,500 times a year across the world.

“Today’s 4.2 magnitude Ramsgate earthquake is approx 260,000 times smaller than the 7.8 Nepal quake event,” it said.

Experts said it was difficult to link the earthquake to a specific fault line. David Galloway, a seismologist with the BGS, said: “The whole of the UK is criss-crossed by thousands of fault lines but most of them are at depth.

“This means we do not pinpoint a specific earthquake to a specific fault because even if a location is a few hundred metres off it could have been a completely different fault.

“Fortunately we do not live on the plate edges – for example, the San Andreas fault in California can actually be seen at the surface, but the faults in the UK are blind and most earthquakes happen at a depth of between 5km (three miles) and 25km.

“Earthquakes happen all over the UK – we get some 200 a year on average. One of the scale of this morning’s only happen every two or three years.” – (PA)