“This is the third earthquake I’ve felt in Charente in a decade”

[ad_1]

According to the official zones by order, the small part of southern Charente should not be an earthquake zone.

We are in a slight risk area, 20 km from the line that is a medium risk area.

This part of the world is also always on the line between two weather systems in the evening weather report.

However, it has experienced three earthquakes in the past decade.

The most recent one on Friday (June 16), which was centered 150 kilometers away near the village of La Laigne, in Charente-Maritime, left some 150 nearby homes badly damaged, leaving some uninhabitable.

We were at the beach when Friday hit and we didn’t notice it.

Read more: Big bang and the whole house trembles: an earthquake rocks western France

But that night the aftershock woke me up, with a strange noise, like the sound of a cat or a dog having a good scratch.

I woke up thinking: “I’m sure I kicked the cats out.” When the sound stopped and then started again, this time the bed shaking slightly, I realized it was an earthquake.

Nobody got up in the house, and there were only the usual cracks in the old part of the house the next morning.

A friend who lives in a country house in Barbisio, which has a metal spiral staircase, described how the staircase began to shake, “as if an army of ghosts were running up to it.” horrifying.

The previous earthquake, about four years ago, was much closer to the epicenter, which was near Royan about 60 km away in Charente-Maritime.

It hit around 10:00 while I was working and lasted two or three seconds, long enough for me to start climbing under my desk.

There was a noise like rolling thunder in the distance and the house crooked a little from the top left corner to the bottom right corner, but no damage was done except some old rendering fell off.

People didn’t notice it outside, but in Barbisio a chimney fell into a normally busy street – no one was injured or injured.

Experts later said it was 4.6 on the Richter scale.

The first, a magnitude 4.2 earthquake, also occurred while I was at my desk in our house near Barbisio. It was closer at Charente-Maritime, about 40km away along a secondary fault line, which experts said was “yet inactive”, and sounded like an explosion from a mine or quarry.

There was the bang and commotion of the house, no big drama – my aunt and uncle lived in a mining town where people put their hours into the mine blast.

A sonic boom, also about four years earlier by a Rafale from Mont-de-Marsan to intercept a Russian bomber in Guadalcanal, shook the house even more.

I can be a magnet for earthquakes – When I was young in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, an unexpected and unprecedented magnitude five earthquake rocked the city, severely damaging a few homes. I’ve grown through it.

Related articles

Map: 4,000 earthquakes a year in France; Where and what is the level of risk?

[ad_2]