Thursday 29 November 2007 at 3.00.19pm
An earthquake rocked Barbados for over a minute today leaving residents and holidaymakers petrified as they tried to understand what had just happened.
Just seconds after 3pm, an earthquake whose epicentre was actually 168 miles off Barbados measured 7.4 on the Richter scale and immediate reports claimed that the quake had been felt as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Puerto Rico.
Sadly one death has been reported in the region and that was of a three-year-old girl, who died from her injuries when a wall collapsed on her in Guadeloupe.
There have been many other casualties reported across the region, even though there was very little structural damage across the Caribbean islands.
The most damage so far has been on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, which was only 14 miles from the epicentre, and here it is reported that several buildings have collapsed.
Veronica Little, journalist at TotallyBarbados.com said, “I was at my desk and it felt liked someone shook my chair, I turned around and honestly thought that my house was haunted!
I then realised that the ground beneath me was shaking and that I could see my fridge rocking from side to side. My first thought was to get out of the house, so I ran out to the lawn and just waited until everything stopped moving.
I then grabbed my car key and raced to collect my children. My biggest fear was of a tsunami and my children’s school is right on the coast line, so my priority was to have them with me further in land.”
CERO – the Central Emergency Relief Organisation has stated that there was no threat of a tsunami in the Caribbean region as the earthquake had happened 90 miles deep in the Ocean.
