Rare Australian earthquake triggers panic in Melbourne

A rare quake rattled southeastern Australia early Wednesday, shaking buildings, knocking down walls and sending panicked residents running into the streets of Melbourne.

The shallow quake hit east of the country’s second-largest city just after 9am local time and was felt hundreds of kilometres away.

The US Geological Survey put the magnitude of the quake at 5.8, later revised up to 5.9, and said it struck at a depth of 10km.

Debris littered roads in the popular shopping area around Melbourne’s Chapel Street, with bricks apparently coming loose from buildings.

Zume Phim, 33, owner of Melbourne’s Oppen cafe, said he rushed onto the street when the temblor hit.

“The whole building was shaking. All the windows, the glass, was shaking – like a wave of shaking,” he told AFP.

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

Sizable earthquakes are unusual in Australia’s populated southeast.

“It was quite violent but everyone was kind of in shock,” Melbourne cafe worker Parker Mayo, 30, told AFP.

Bricks and rubble lay on the ground outside Betty’s Burgers in Melbourne, with large sheets of metal hanging off the restaurant awning.

The restaurant said in a Facebook post that everyone was safe: “We were fortunate that nobody was in the restaurant at the time.”

‘Very disturbing event’

At around just under magnitude six this was “the biggest event in south east Australia for a long time” 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. “This is significantly bigger.”

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 quake “would have caused many billions of dollars in damage had it been under Melbourne,” he added.

Geosciences Australia said an aftershock measuring 4.0 struck shortly after the initial temblor.

The mayor of Mansfield, near the quake epicentre, said there was no damage in the small town but it had taken residents by surprise.

“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,” Mark Holcombe told public broadcaster ABC.

“We don’t have earthquakes that I am aware of – none of the locals I spoke to this morning had that experience with earthquakes here before – so it is one right out of left field.”

Emergency services said they had received calls for help as far away as Dubbo, about 700km from the quake epicentre, with fire and rescue crews dispatched to help.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, speaking from New York, said there were no initial reports of injuries.

“It can be a very, very disturbing event for an earthquake of this nature,” he said. “They are very rare events in Australia.”