JEAN MARC RAM­PER­SAD

Cli­mate Change Ed­i­tor & Weath­er An­chor

A 6.7 mag­ni­tude earth­quake struck the north-east­ern Caribbean at 8:38 am to­day, cen­tred 222 kilo­me­tres east of Guade­loupe at a depth of 12 kilo­me­tres, ac­cord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre (UWI-SRC).

Three af­ter­shocks fol­lowed over the next 48 min­utes, mea­sur­ing 5.2, 6.1 and 5.4 re­spec­tive­ly.

Re­ports on UWI-SRC’s Face­book page in­di­cat­ed that the ini­tial quake was felt as far south as St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, about 400 kilo­me­tres from the epi­cen­tre, and as far north as St Kitts and Nevis.

As of 10:15 am, UWI-SRC record­ed three ad­di­tion­al small­er tremors — mea­sur­ing 3.7, 4.1 and 4.2 — in rough­ly the same area, bring­ing the to­tal num­ber of af­ter­shocks to six.

The Caribbean re­mains a seis­mi­cal­ly ac­tive re­gion where earth­quakes must be ex­pect­ed. On Oc­to­ber 24, cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go ex­pe­ri­enced a 5.1 mag­ni­tude tremor that was al­so felt in Grena­da.

The pub­lic is re­mind­ed to drop, cov­er, and hold on to some­thing stur­dy dur­ing an earth­quake, and to vis­it the web­sites or so­cial me­dia pages of the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) and UWI-SRC for more earth­quake safe­ty in­for­ma­tion.