Massive Earthquake Hits UK
February 27, 2008
The largest earthquake to hit Britain for almost quarter of a century was felt across large parts of England in the early hours of this morning. Its epicentre was 15 miles north of Lincoln, near Market Rasen, and the British Geological Survey reported the earthquake as measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale.
Tremors were felt in areas including Merseyside, Birmingham, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Northampton, Norfolk, Surrey and Greater London - including the offices of Bite The News. The five-second tremor struck at 00.55am.
Bob Richardson, 45, from Market Rasen had fallen asleep while watching ‘When Fascist Dictators Go Bad’ when he almost felt the tremor. His wife Patricia was also nearly woken up.
Mr Richardson said: “It was incredible - I never felt anything. I was like nothing had actually happened.”
A resident in Norfolk described it as “the biggest thing to hit Norfolk since Stephen Fry arguing with Delia Smith at the bring-and-buy.”
She said: “It was like a big juggernaut coming down the road. But seeing as I live 12 miles from the A47 I didn’t feel a thing.”
Nigel Bailey of Barnsley in South Yorkshire was asleep when the tremor shook his house and woke him up. “It was pretty scary I can tell you. Stuff was exactly where I had left it the night before. It was pretty rough.”
Other witnesses reported to Bite The News that wildlife - birds and pets- became highly agitated as people began to panic for no reason.
Bite The News readers have been writing in to tell of their earthquake experiences. Derek Ashford of Manchester described how “I thought something had happened so I set my car alarm off just to annoy the neighbours” and “a magazine wasn’t where I’d left it” in his fourth-floor flat, to the consternation of his cats, while Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son of Manchester Metropolitan University said that the quake made the buildings feel like “a rather large place where people go to learn things. By the way, you haven’t seen a pig anywhere have you?”.
David Butters in North London, meanwhile, said that he felt a “four-second rumble, like a train going under the house. Mind you, I do live over Finchley Central Tube Station”.
The earthquake was the largest since 1984, when north Wales was hit by a tremor of magnitude 5.4 on the Richter scale, again, news teams worldwide made something out of nothing. The largest this century came when the West Midlands was hit by an earthquake in 2002 in the Dudley area that reached 5.6 on the Richter scale and caused a cat to be slightly bemused.
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