New Delhi, August 12: Thousands of residents of India’s Andaman Islands spent the night out in fields and on roads, fearing aftershocks after a magnitude-7.6 earthquake jolted the region Tuesday, officials and news reports said.
The quake’s epicentre was in the Indian Ocean about 256 kilometres north of Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the India Meteorological Department in New Delhi said.
No casualties were reported, but several houses on the Andaman Islands and in towns along the coast of eastern and southern India developed cracks, the PTI and IANS news agencies reported.
The tremor occurred at 1:26 am (1956 GMT Wednesday) and was also felt in the eastern state of Orissa and in several towns in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, including its capital, Chennai, all of which lie along the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean.
“We woke up after our house was shaken and some of our windows opened suddenly,” said Sadasiba Mohapatra, a business executive who lives in Orissa’s capital, Bhubaneshwar.
Mohapatra and his family said they stayed on the road outside their house for several hours.
A tsunami warning was issued for Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand but was cancelled after about two hours.
An official at India’s National Tsunami Early Warning Centre in the southern city of Hyderabad said the preliminary analysis of sea-level guages had indicated there was no likelihood of a tsunami.
The warning centre was set up after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed 230,000 people in coastal India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
–Agencies