Tremors jolt Bihar, UP & Odisha

Mild tremors jolted several towns across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha on Sunday evening triggering panic though these states.

At least two persons were reported to have been killed in Bihar in the earthquake on Sunday evening. While one person died in the stampede in Darbhanga, a girl was killed when an old house collapsed at Harnaut in Nalanda district.

The tremors, which were felt for 25 seconds, triggered panick in Patna. Within no time, hordes of residents came out on the streets of their colony as a precautionary measure. While senior citizens were seen asking everyone to get out of the house, small children enjoyed experiencing the ‘earthquake’, which, they had studied in books only. “For the first time, I felt tremors. Till now, I had read about it only in my books. It was really scary,” said Aman, a Class VII student.

But Shakuntla Choudhary, 75, had experienced it several times before. “I was having my evening tea, when suddenly the glass on my dining table started trembling. It was then that I realised that the chair on which I was sitting was also shuddering. All of us rushed out of the house, only to find that scores of people were already there on the road,” she told Deccan Herald. As panic gripped the state, telephone lines were choked with everyone making calling each other to know about the well-being. Stampede broke out in Nalanda jail too where two prisoners were injured in the melee.

In Katihar, two under-construction buildings caved in, while in Patna too, a portion of an under-construction apartment collapsed.  In Uttar Prashesh, tremors were felt in Lucknow, Varanasi, Allahabad, Kanpur, Azamgarh, Mau, Jaunpur, Raebareli and other towns in the eastern and we­stern regions, official so­urces said. Terrified people came out on the streets in Lucknow where the tremors lasted for a few seconds. “There were three jerks each lasting for a few seconds”, said a resident in the posh Gomti Nagar area of the city, who rushed out of his seventh floor flat in a multi-storyed bu­ilding. People in the old city areas rushed to the open spaces.

At some places, people also th­ronged places of worship. Acc­ording to official sources, the magnitude of the quake on the Ritcher scale was between three to five. The intensity of the tremors varied at different places.  There was no report of any loss of life or property, sources said.

Tremors were felt in a few Od­isha cities, including  Bhu­b­aneswar.  People in other towns like Cuttack and Sambalpur in western Odisha too felt the quake though for a couple of seconds only. According to a report from Cuttack, in some areas, residents came out of their homes as soon as they felt the tremor.