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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Panorama final rocked by tremor but 4.9 quake fails to shake All Stars

by

20130210

A 4.9 mag­ni­tude earth­quake shook north Trinidad at 1.27 am yes­ter­day, while the band Neal & Massy All Stars was per­form­ing in the Panora­ma fi­nal at the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah, Port-of-Spain.But it did lit­tle, if noth­ing, to de­ter the band from grab­bing sec­ond place.Pan lovers re­port­ed that the quake was "long and hard" and "had the Sa­van­nah shak­ing." The quake, com­ing al­most at the of­fi­cial start of Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions and two days of aban­don, gave res­i­dents in north Trinidad quite a scare.

Fright­ened peo­ple e-mailed mes­sages to each oth­er. Some sent e-mails say­ing it was prob­a­bly Sa­tan work­ing his way to the sur­face to be on the streets for Car­ni­val Mon­day and Tues­day.The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies's Seis­mic Re­search Unit re­port­ed yes­ter­day that the earth­quake oc­curred north of the Paria Penin­su­la and was lo­cat­ed at 11.08�N and 62.04�W.

"The mag­ni­tude was 4.9 and the depth 110km...There were felt re­ports from Glen­coe Trinidad," it stat­ed.The Seis­mic Re­search Unit not­ed the re­sults were pre­lim­i­nary and may vary slight­ly when ad­di­tion­al da­ta is processed.Head of the unit, Dr Joan Latch­man, said it is not when you feel an earth­quake you should get wor­ried. She in­sist­ed cit­i­zens of T&T es­pe­cial­ly must al­ways be pre­pared, since a big earth­quake is due in the re­gion any­time.

Not­ing that T&T is in a seis­mi­cal­ly ac­tive re­gion, Latch­man said the last big earth­quake in T&T oc­curred over two cen­turies ago in 1766, mea­sur­ing close to 8 mag­ni­tude. The last big one in the East­ern Caribbean mea­sured around 8.8 and took place in 1843, she said."The Caribbean plates and the North and South Amer­i­can plates are con­verg­ing at a rate of two cen­time­tres per year," she added.

"This means our big earth­quakes take a long time to come...But we should ex­pect to get a big one and must al­ways be pre­pared," Latch­man warned."We could not have pre­dict­ed an earth­quake was go­ing to hap­pen at 1.27 Sun­day morn­ing."

She said earth­quakes mea­sur­ing be­tween 4.6 and 5.0 in mag­ni­tude usu­al­ly oc­cur in the East­ern Caribbean seis­mic zone on an av­er­age of twice per year. Big­ger quakes mea­sur­ing be­tween 6.1 and 6.97 usu­al­ly oc­cur every ten to 15 years. For more tips, you can check out the unit's Web site at uwi­seis­mic.com


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