BRITAIN: Chimneys tumbled and windows from Wales to London rattled after the worst earthquake to strike Britain in 10 years. There were no reports of serious injury from the quake and a later aftershock.
BRITAIN: The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland raised doubts about earthquake risks to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria, but its operators, British Nuclear Fuels, said its buildings were resistant to quake damage.
The earthquake struck at 12.54 a.m. yesterday, registering 4.8 on the Richter scale, according to the British Geological Survey. The later aftershock occurred at 4.32 a.m, and measured 2.7 Richter points.
Both tremors had their epicentres 9.7 km under Wolverhampton, about 20 km west of Birmingham, according to the Survey and people as far apart as south and west Wales, Northamptonshire, south Yorkshire and Oxfordshire felt the main quake.
There were one or two confirmed reports in the Republic from members of the public who felt it here, said Prof Peter Readman of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The institute operates a national network of seismic recording devices that pick up the telltale shockwaves of earthquakes. Researchers here have already begun to examine the data recovered during the event.
Although large by standards in these islands, a 4.8 event was not a major quake, Prof Readman said. "In Britain they occur every decade at that level." Britain experiences about 200 minor quakes a year and Ireland experiences quakes in the one- to two-point range.
The threat of earthquake damage at Sellafield had not been fully analysed, according to the Radiological Protection Institute. Its analysis of risks to the highly radioactive liquid wastes stored above ground at Sellafield raised concerns. One of the authors of aRPII report of December 2000, Dr Christopher Hone, said the institute would still have doubts about how the liquid waste tanks would perform in the event of a serious earthquake.
"It would be an area of some concern but the terrorist concern has taken over as a leading worry," he said yesterday.
The Sellafield plant was not affected by yesterday's earthquake said a spokesman for British Nuclear Fuels. It was too far from the epicentre to have had any impact. A similar earthquake occurring directly under the Sellafield plant would still have had little effect on the nuclear reprocessing facilities there, he said.
"All the buildings on the Sellafield site have safety cases that take into account earthquake activity," he said.