“I was very afraid. It made a noise like a bomb underground and it moved well. I could not go back to sleep … “Like Béatrice, a resident of Cheylas (in the Grésivaudan valley, in Isère), several thousand inhabitants of Savoy and Isère felt the earthquake that touched the two departments, at 3:40 am for about twenty seconds, on the night of Monday to Tuesday. An earthquake of magnitude 4.1 on the Richter scale, described as moderate, whose epicenter was located 19 km south of Chambéry, in the town of Sainte-Marie d’Alloix.
It is one of the most powerful earthquakes that occurred in France for a year, after those of September 14 off Cannes (magnitude 4.4) and December 9 in Saint-Paul-sur-Ubaye (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), a magnitude of 4.2 which had surprised the inhabitants to Nice. But this time, “the shallow depth of the earthquake (5 kilometers) made him feel more strongly near the epicenter than a deeper earthquake of similar magnitude would do it,” said the French seismological central office.
Frequent and generally imperceptible seismic trees
Some 421 people testified to the organization that they felt the earth tremble and 402 of them heard noises sometimes as violent as an explosion. A small part of them (16 people) attended the movement or the fall of objects. The phenomenon did not do any damage or injured.
Seismic tremors are frequent in France but they rarely exceed an intensity of 3 on the Richter scale and remain imperceptible for humans.
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