With a magnitude of 5.3 to 5.8 according to the National Seismic Monitoring Network (Renass) and the French Central Seismological Bureau (BCSF), the violent tremor occurred at 6:38 p.m. in the town of Cram-Chaban (Charente -Maritime), near Mauzé-sur-le-Mignon (Deux-Sèvres), halfway between La Rochelle and Niort.
From Bordeaux to Rennes via Limoges or La Rochelle, many residents felt the earth shake and multiplied calls for firefighters.
In Tours, Léa Franke, a law student, was reading a book on her bed when she was suddenly “very scared”. “I got up and then my whole apartment shook: the mirror hanging on the wall, the microwave, the glasses, etc. It lasted a few seconds and then it stopped,” she told the newspaper. AFP.
“I’m on the 3rd floor of a building, I thought it was going to collapse.” In mainland France, the last earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5 dates back to 2019 in Drôme. “On average, there is one every 10 years in metropolitan France,” Jérôme Vergne, seismologist at the Earth and Environment Institute in Strasbourg, told AFP. “
In the region, the last of a fairly similar magnitude dates back to 1972 in Oléron.
So for the region of the great west, it is really an important event”, he underlined, adding that some aftershocks had been detected. In Deux-Sèvres, “a lightly injured person was taken care of by the emergency services “, according to a report from the prefecture which reports material damage to buildings, mainly cracks and falling rocks, such as that of Charente-Maritime, where no victims have been identified by the emergency services.
On the other hand, more than a thousand homes were without electricity in this department at the start of the evening, a high voltage line having been affected according to the authorities. In the town of La Laigne (Charente-Maritime), a town of 500 inhabitants very close to the epicenter, the church tower has major cracks and a dozen houses have been deemed “uninhabitable” by firefighters because cracks on the load-bearing walls, noted in the evening an AFP correspondent.
These home inspections were to continue throughout the night with the reinforcement of building experts from neighboring departments. In Tours, Charline Verdun, a 26-year-old student nurse who lives on the 8th floor of a building, was sitting on her balcony at the time of the tremor.
“It was impressive. I wondered what it could be. An earthquake, I had never experienced one. I didn’t really understand, I thought I was hallucinating,” she said.
In Châtelaillon-Plage (Charente-Maritime), an AFP correspondent first felt “a dull rumbling”. “It escalated and I felt the house wobble, the walls undulate, books fell.”
On the Ile de Ré, Marianne Kleip was with her four children “when the sofa vibrated”.
“It lasted 5 or 6 seconds, I had just enough time to understand and shout to my children + out! +. I said to myself: every time, it could increase and the house will fall. I thought about what happened in Turkey,” the 32-year-old social worker told AFP.
“The neighbors didn’t understand, they thought it was a truck. My children no longer dared to enter the house. In the end, it’s more fear than harm.”
“The epicenter is between Niort and La Rochelle”, specifies the town hall of Niort (Deux-Sèvres), on Twitter. Many comments testify to the shock on social networks in many cities such as Rennes, Bordeaux, Angers and Nantes.
