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Earthquake rocks northern Sweden

TT/The Local/pvs
TT/The Local/pvs - [email protected]
Earthquake rocks northern Sweden

An earthquake hit Härnösand in northern Sweden on Monday evening.

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"It was a quake between 2.5 and 3.0 on the Righter scale," said Reynir Bödvarsson at the Seismological Institute in Uppsala, to news agency TT.

Hans Lindahl at the emergency services in Härnösand told of a loud noise.

"First we thought that someone had driven a car into the station, in the brick wall at the side. Then people started to ask if we knew what it was. One called from home and said that it was shaking so much that he though the tiled stove would collapse," he said.

No material damages were reported and despite the quake, calm has returned, Lindahl said.

"The strange this is we haven't heard anything from the epicentre which lies around 20 kilometres west of the city.

The National Rail Administration (Banverket) has been conducting explosions in the area and people have perhaps mixed the earthquake with the tunnel explosions."

According to Reynir Bödvarsson earthquakes of this magnitude occur about once a year in Sweden. Earlier this year Umeå experienced an earthquake.

"The coast of Norrland is one of the areas where we have the most earthquakes. But it is first when the scale hits five that there can be major damages. That happens about once every 100 years in Sweden."

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