Rare Aussie earthquake triggers panic in Melbourne

MELBOURNE • A rare quake rattled south-eastern Australia yesterday, shaking buildings, knocking down walls and sending panicked Melbourne residents running into the streets.

The shallow 5.9-magnitude temblor hit east of the country's second-largest city at the start of the working day and was one of the largest quakes in Australia in decades.

With Melbourne entering its eighth week of pandemic lockdown and facing a third straight day of violent anti-vaccine protests, most residents were at home when the quake struck.

Cafe owner Zume Phim, 33, said he rushed onto the street as the tremor hit. "The whole building was shaking. All the windows, the glass, they were shaking - like a wave of shaking," he said.

"I have never experienced that before. It was a little bit scary."

In a popular shopping area around Melbourne's Chapel Street, masonry debris tumbled from buildings and littered the roads.

Bricks and rubble surrounded a burger restaurant and large sheets of metal hung off its awning.

"We were fortunate that nobody was in the restaurant at the time," the restaurant said on Facebook.

Victoria's State Emergency Service said it had received 100 calls for assistance "largely related to minor structural damage to chimneys and facades on buildings".

"It was quite violent but everyone was kind of in shock," cafe worker Parker Mayo, 30, said.

Sizeable earthquakes are unusual in Australia.

At magnitude 5.9 and a depth of 10km, this was "the biggest event in south-east Australia for a long time", Professor Mike Sandiford, a geologist at the University of Melbourne, told AFP.

"We had some very big ones at magnitude six in the late 1800s, though precise magnitudes are not well known."

A quake of this size is expected every "10-20 years in south-east Australia, the last was Thorpdale in 2012", he said.

Geoscience Australia reported that the initial quake was followed by a series of six smaller ones, ranging from magnitude 2.5 to 4.1.

Prof Sandiford said Australians should expect "many hundreds of aftershocks, most below human sensitivity threshold, but probably a dozen or more that will be felt at least nearby".

The country's deadliest tremor, a 5.6-magnitude quake in Newcastle in 1989, resulted in 13 deaths.

The mayor of Mansfield, near the quake epicentre, said there was no damage in the small town.

"I was sitting down at work at my desk and I needed to run outside. It took me a while to work out what it was," Mr Mark Holcombe told public broadcaster ABC.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE