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Souleymane Loum
| 23 seconds ago
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A earthquake occurred this Tuesday, January 7 in the Himalayan region of Tibet, southwest of China; it was felt as far away as neighboring Nepal. The earthquake, with a magnitude of 6.8 – the American Geological Survey (USGS) says 7.1 – caused more than 95 deaths and caused significant material damage.
The earth shook in the canton of Dingri, nestled on the edge of the Sino-Nepal border, at precisely 9:05 a.m. (local time), reports the Chinese National Earthquake Agency (CENC). “The tremors were very strongly felt in and around the canton of Dingri and many buildings collapsed near the epicenter.», Specified Chinese public television CCTV.
In the videos broadcast by CCTV we see white houses at high altitude, the walls are gutted and the roofs have collapsed, with stones everywhere populating the ground. Other images from the channel show cars trapped by bricks or customers of a convenience store who desert the store when the earthquake hits and causes the products placed on the shelves to fall.
Firefighters in orange outfits arrived at the scene of the tragedy, they circulated in the rubble to rescue survivors, especially elderly people protected in blankets, CCTV videos show. The epicenter of the earthquake is some 370 km southwest of the regional capital, Lhasa, according to CENC data.
This canton located at high altitude is home to nearly 62,000 inhabitants and is a stone’s throw from the Chinese side of Everest. Temperatures there are -8°C during the day and could fall to -18°C tonight, according to the Chinese National Meteorological Bureau.
Certainly earthquakes are recurrent in the region, but this Tuesday is the most powerful recorded within a radius of 200 kilometers during the last 5 years, reported the CENC.
In Nepal, the earthquake, which was felt as far as the capital Kathmandu, struck the localities around Namche and Lobuche, not far from the Everest base camp. “It shook quite hard here, everyone is awake but we are not aware of any damage at the moment“, commented Jagat Prasad Bhusal, an official from the Namche region in northeastern Nepal.
Note that the Himalayas sit on the fracture line between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates and have frequent seismic activity. In 2015, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake caused some 9,000 deaths and more than 22,000 injuries in Nepal, pulverizing more than 500,000 homes.
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seismic activity, National Earthquake Agency, injured, CENC, China, death, Dingri, Sino-Nepalese border, Kathmandu, deaths, Nepal, tectonic plates, Himalayan region, earth tremor, earthquake, Tibet, earthquakes
