Zagreb
A powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake rocked the western Balkans and collapsed buildings in central Croatia on Tuesday, leaving rescue teams combing through the rubble in the hard-hit town of Petrinja, about 30 miles south of the capital Zagreb.
The tremor struck at a depth of 10 kilometres at around 1130 GMT near Petrinja, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). The number of injured is not yet known.
In Zagreb, panicked residents raced onto the streets. Pulitzer-prize winning New York writer Tim Page told the Telegraph: “We felt it good and hard here.”
“I taught at USC in California for a number of years, so am quite accustomed to earthquakes, but this is the first time I have actually ever hidden myself under something.”
In hard-hit Petrinja, which is home to around 20,000 people, images from the Croatian Red Cross showed collapsed buildings and streets strewn with rubble as residents desperately dug for survivors with their bare hands.
“We are pulling people from cars, we don’t know if there are dead or injured,” the mayor of Petrinja Darinko Dumbovic told regional broadcaster N1. “There is general panic, people are looking for their loved ones.” N1 quoted a Petrinja town official as saying that a 12-year old child in Petrinja had been killed, but gave no details. It was not immediately possible to verify the report.
Separate footage on N1 showed firefighters trying to remove the debris to reach the car, which was buried underneath. A man and a small boy were rescued from the car and carried into an ambulance.
The earthquake was also felt in neighbouring Slovenia, the Austrian capital Vienna, and Veneto in northern Italy, where the regional governor Luca Zaia interrupted his daily Covid-19 briefing to determine if there had been any local damage.
Slovenia’s aging Krsko nuclear power plant, the only one in the country and located about 60 miles east of the capital Ljubljana, was shut down as a precaution.
The tremor comes one day after a smaller, 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck Petrinja, causing some damage to buildings. The Balkan region lies on major fault lines and is regularly hit by earthquakes.—AFP
