The inhabitants of West Crete – or at least the light sleepers among them – were roused at about 5.20 am this morning by an SMS from the 112 emergency service warning of an imminent earthquake. The tremor was predicted to be of 5.5 magnitude on the Richter scale and “light shaking” was likely to be experienced. The actual earthquake, when it arrived a few seconds later, was as strong as has been felt in the area for some years, and went on for a relatively long time – over five seconds.
The initial parameters of an earthquake tend to get revised over the course of time, being derived from its impact at different points on the map. The Seismological Laboratory of the University of Athens initially quoted a magnitude of 6.2 Richter, at a location 79 km east-north-east of Heraklion and a focal depth of around 40 km. By the time the morning news programmes had got onto the story, this had been revised down to 6.1 Richter. The quake had been felt all round the south Aegean, it was reported, and as far as Attica on the mainland. However there have been no reports so far of any damage.
Like the earthquake of similar magnitude registered a week ago off Kasos, today’s tremor was judged not to represent any threat to the residents of Crete. Talking to Mega TV’s early morning news programme, Professor Efthymios Lekkas, the president of the Earthquake Planning and Protection Organisation, said that because of the great depth at which it occurred, the tremor was felt over a much wider area but the effects were correspondingly limited, and there was no risk of a tsunami.
The earthquake took place in a trench, he said, and not on the fault of the Hellenic Arc, and in all likelihood the 6.1 magnitude tremor was the main one, with little risk of aftershocks. There was no connection with the earthquakes at Santorini, he said (they all took place at depths of less than 10 km). In the event there was a flurry of smaller quakes in the area in the few hours following the first, the strongest one to date being of 3.5 magnitude at 09:50 local time.
With news programmes now geared up to receive text messages from viewers/listeners while on the air, such events tend to receive immediate eye-witness accounts before they can get reports from local journalists, and in this case messages from the east end of the island confirmed that the earthquake was strongly felt and seemed to go on for a long time but no appreciable damage had been caused.