Melbourne earthquake: expert warns future shocks will kill

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After Sunday night’s earthquake in Melbourne, an expert warned of “enormous vulnerabilities” and that future earthquakes “will kill people”.

The 3.8-magnitude quake occurred at 11.41pm on Sunday, shaking the city and waking up residents. The epicenter was located in Sunbury, about 35 kilometers northwest of Melbourne CBD, according to Geoscience Australia.

More than 21,000 people reported feeling the quake – believed to be the strongest to hit the Melbourne metropolitan area in more than 120 years – as far north as Bendigo and as far south as Hobart, the agency said.

No injuries and minor damage were reported, but speaking to 3AW on Monday, Mark Quigley, associate professor of seismology at the University of Melbourne, warned that more should be done to secure buildings in the city.

He told host Neil Mitchell: “Laziness is a strong word but we are comfortable in many respects about earthquake risk in Melbourne.”

“We have huge vulnerabilities — you just go down Brunswick Street or Smith Street, and you can see buildings, you can see vulnerable items everywhere. It doesn’t take a very strong earthquake to really cause catastrophic damage.”

Professor Quigley said there were “things that can be done” to reduce the risk.

He said, “It’s the interface between what we learn about science and what we learn about engineering that’s really important, and that’s the piece to work on.”

“It’s a very noisy world, and there’s an enormous amount of prioritization in all areas of concern, but from the world of earthquakes what I see as the least hanging fruit is more work done to identify the very weak structures that will collapse in future earthquakes and will kill people. We know this – that A lesson we learned centuries ago.

He said that “retrofitting, reinforcing and securing loose elements” can be done “without compromising the beauty of the urban landscape, and that is something to consider.”

Sunday’s quake was stronger than the 2.8-magnitude quake that struck Melbourne’s eastern suburbs earlier this month, although the quake was still strong enough to shake people’s homes.

In September of 2021, the state of Victoria was hit by a record-breaking 5.8-magnitude earthquake, with its epicenter near the small town of Mansfield. I felt this person as far away as Sydney and Tasmania. Buildings shook and walls collapsed.

It was followed by two aftershocks of magnitude 4.0 and 3.1 at 18 and 39 minutes – both located within 10 kilometers of the original tremors.

Professor Quigley’s historical records of earthquakes were so good that Australia had had seismographs for over a century.

“Before that, of course, we had a lot of historical records,” he said.

“There have been a lot of historical earthquakes all over Victoria – in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s etc. There were some devastating ones at Warrnambool, Ocean Grove in the 1920s, Benalla in the 30s. People noticed them, they were in the papers but we have them. Short memories.

“Woosh, clank and then rattle”

The moment the earthquake struck, the camera caught on sports radio station SEN 1116, where the microphone in front of host Damian Watson was seen visibly shaking.

“Welcome back – we’ve had a shake-up in the studio, I’m not sure if you’ve got it home,” Watson told listeners. “It felt like a little earthquake.”

A man living in Melbourne’s CBD shared footage from his window moments after the earthquake struck, showing hundreds of high-rise apartments with their lights on.

“Melbourne’s earthquake was felt throughout the CBD, everyone wide awake,” he wrote.

Another social media user posted home security footage showing her house shaking violently before her cat came down the stairs. “As you can see Kitty is not a pop up,” she wrote.

Melbourne residents quickly jumped online to verify that what they really felt was an earthquake. “An earthquake or did I just have a really serious scare to myself from the moment I fell asleep?” writes Matilda Bosley of The Guardian.

Sunbury resident Corey Lines told The Age he felt a “very big, violent tremor” and it left a crack in his kitchen wall. “I thought a car or a truck had hit the house, and before I could stand up, dogs were running around the house barking,” Mr Lainez said.

Speaking to Prof Quigley on Monday, Mitchell asked about the “whoosh, then clatter and then rattle” sound a listener had reported hearing.

“What’s annoying?” asked Mitchell.

Professor Quigley said: “What you hear are seismic waves coming from the earthquake and basically radiating through the Earth’s crust, and the interaction of those waves, which is basically movements in the ground, with everything in your home.” .

“So you might hear a crack associated with an earthquake pushing something in a certain direction and causing something to slide or your house to crack. The sound of the hum, the seismic waves come at several kilometers per second, people describe in big earthquakes it sounds like a big truck or a train is coming toward them, and then they feel next vibrations.

The deadliest earthquake in Australian history was the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, which killed 13 people and injured 160. The 5.6-magnitude quake damaged fifty thousand buildings, 300 of which were demolished, and left a bill of nearly $4 billion.

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