By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS,
Kathmandu : There is no further danger of another immediate major trembler, seismological experts in Nepal said Monday, after a quake killed 39 people in Nepal and India and destroyed hundreds of houses in the two neighbouring countries.
“With the pent-up energy having been released, there is no danger of another immediate major tremor,” said Dilli Ram Tiwari, survey officer at Nepal’s National Seismological Centre in Kathmandu.
The killer quake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale that hit Sikkim in northeastern Nepal and neighbouring Nepal’s eastern and central regions at 6.25 p.m. Sunday has been followed by 130 aftershocks, Tiwari said.
“Of these, only four were big enough to be noticed, measuring 4 on the Richter scale,” he said. “The others were far less and are not even likely to be noticed by people away from the epicentre.”
Tiwari said the aftershocks will continue in Sikkim for some time, perhaps even for a couple of months, but without posing much peril.
This was the fourth largest earthquake to hit Nepal amidst the dreaded anticipation that a killer trembler was due any time soon.
However, due to the epicentre being almost 300 km away aerially from Kathmandu, the human casualties were not as severe as in the past, Tiwari said.
The most devastating tremor, of the magnitude of 8.4, occurred in 1934 with the epicentre being on the Nepal-Bihar border.
It killed at least 8,519 people in Nepal alone and destroyed over 80,000 buildings.
Despite being one of the countries most vulnerable to earthquakes due to its location in the Himalayan region, Nepal had a respite for almost half a century before the next major earthquake struck in 1980.
Measuring 6.6, it hit farwestern Nepal, leaving 125 recorded deaths and over 11,000 buildings destroyed.
The next jolt occurred pretty soon, within a decade.
A trembler measuring 6.7 in 1988 flattened nearly 65,000 buildings and killed over 700 people.
(Sudeshna Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])