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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Calla Wahlquist

Melbourne buildings damaged in Victorian earthquake and aftershocks expected – as it happened

The earthquake that was

Well, that was an exciting and slightly scary morning. We are going to close this blog here, but you can continue to follow any new developments on the earthquake via our Australian news liveblog, here.

Let’s just recap on what has happened:

We will continue to bring you any major developments as they happen over at the Australia news live blog. Thanks for your company, stay safe, and beware of any aftershocks.

Updated

Director of damaged Chapel St burger shop says dozens of staff affected

The Melbourne building that has featured on all the footage of earthquake damage this morning is Betty’s Burgers & Concrete Co, an American-style burger shop on Chapel Street.

Tim McDonagh, the managing director of Betty’s Burgers, said seeing the damage was surreal and that it was a “catastrophe” in already unusual circumstances.

Guardian Australia spoke to him outside the building. McDonagh said that fortunately no staff members were on site at the time of the damage, and the resident of an apartment above the restaurant was able to safely evacuate.

No one got hurt, so that’s the main thing. Our team is safe, our guests are safe.

He pointed at the debris on the pavement, and said:

If this was a non-lockdown period, someone would have been underneath that.

McDonagh had been in Elsternwick at the time of the earthquake, about to open a new Betty’s Burgers store there. The Chapel Street building has major damage to the roof and side wall, and McDonagh said he has been told the repairs may take three to four months.

It’s hard enough to just make ends meet through this period of time without major catastrophes like this.

A large portion of our team are young team members desperate to come back to work. We’re so excited with dining rooms planned to reopen, and now 40 to 50 young team members won’t be able to return to work at this restaurant.

The Windsor establishment was the company’s number one branch for takeaway and delivery in the country, McDonagh said.

Because we’re in lockdown, we’re so reliant on it, so the last restaurant that we needed to down was this one.

Updated

Merlino: earthquake officially 5.8 magnitude, more aftershocks could come

The Victorian deputy premier James Merlino says the earthquake is officially 5.8 magnitude — which Geoscience Australia reported some time ago.

He said there have been three aftershocks but more could come.

So far there have been just 46 reports of damage across the state. About 35,000 homes lost power but must are back up now.

The Victorian state control centre has now taken over the response to the earthquake.

People gather near a damaged building in Chapel Street after the 5.8 magnitude quake on Wednesday.
People gather near a damaged building in Chapel Street after the 5.8 magnitude quake on Wednesday. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images

Updated

Dr Adrian McCullum, a senior lecturer in geotechnical engineering at the University of the Sunshine Coast, said these earthquakes occur because the continental plate on which Australia sits is moving north at about seven centimetres per year.

“This builds up compressive stress within the Australian plate,” he said.

He said this stress is occasionally released – resulting in an earthquake – typically along pre-existing fault lines, where the earth has sheared (and can shear again) because of these stresses.

Inspection of the geological maps of Victoria shows a large number of faults in the Mansfield region in Victoria.

“Thus it appears like an area where the release of compressive stress via an earthquake might be probable,” McCullum said.

Updated

More reports of damage in Melbourne are coming in. Here we have SES crews attempting to repair a chimney that partly collapsed, putting a hole in the roof and some bricks into the neighbour’s place.

I say again: I am absolutely amazed at how little damage there has been. Consider how much damage was done by high winds in central Victoria earlier this year, and the havoc wreaked on the Dandenongs, which were hit by a severe storm from the same cold front.

Updated

Fortunately the 5.8 magnitude earthquake does not appear to have damaged the underground gold mines at Woods Point, which was just a few kilometres from the epicentre.

The two key mines are Morning Star Mine, about 500m west of the town near Morning Star Creek, which opened in 1861, and the A1 mine about 23km south-east of Jamieson. A1 is operated by junior gold producer Centennial Mining, which was acquired by Kaiser Reef in January this year.

Neither has reported significant damage, and we are still trying to confirm with the owners of those mines, but locals who work there have reported they are “all good”.

Updated

Back in Melbourne, Mia Mannik and Tia Gardiner live in an apartment in Windsor, near the damaged building on Chapel Street. They said they were “freaked out” by the tremors.

I thought initially it was like wind blowing, but our whole building was shaking, the walls were shaking. We went outside after it happened and the pavement outside was cracked.

Earthquake reports from north-east Victoria: 'It felt like a truck hit the building'

Jamie Kronborg, who works for state MP Tania Maxwell as a media spokesperson, was sitting in their first floor office in Faithfull Street Wangaratta.

It was like heavily laden truck. It almost felt like a truck hit the building. We are in this squat flat building with a ground floor plus one on top. It moved, no question, quite briefly and then went again. Someone in the front section of the office yelled ‘let’s get out’ so we did.

Then everyone was out the front of their buildings because Faithfull Street is the main street.

Jamie’s partner Peter Kenyon was in the butcher shop at Beechworth and the power went off in that town. A couple of shelves in the butchery rattled to the floor.

Robert Reeve and his partner Kaye Dyson live in the village of Merrijig, about 15 minutes away from Mansfield.

He said when the first quake struck at 9.15am, the building went into a “really intense rattle”.

It was followed by a second more mild quake about 15 minutes later.

Updated

The Geosciences Australia “shake map”, a visual representation of ground shaking in an earthquake, shows that light ground shaking was felt out to a radius of about 600km from the epicentre, with weak ground shaking out to about 700-800km away.

That translates to light ground shaking in Mildura, northern Tasmania, the central west and Riverina areas of NSW, and Canberra, and weak shaking as far afield as Dubbo and Sydney.

Weak and light shaking is not associated with damage.

Melbourne and parts of Victoria – central, north-east and most of Gippsland – experienced moderate shaking, which can come with some very light damage. The area directly around the quake – Mansfield, Woods Point, Matlock – experienced strong tremors.

Updated

The NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, said her thoughts were with “everybody who has ben impacted by the earthquake in Victoria”.

Speaking at the daily coronavirus press conference, she said:

Obviously, our thoughts are with everybody who has been impacted by the earthquake in Victoria and we know that people in New South Wales have even felt the tremors so our thoughts are with everybody and we hope everybody stays safe and accounted for during this very difficult time.

The Victorian State Emergency Service received 48 requests for assistance between midnight and 11am today, of which 27 were for building damage.

The areas with the most calls were Malvern and Footscray.

We are really quite lucky that most of the post-earthquake reports are on about this scale — stuff falling off of shelves.

And in Sydney, Animal Justice Party MP Emma Hurst said her “whole apartment block moved”.

A lot of apartment dwellers in Melbourne have said they thought their building was collapsing this morning.

It was at least a way to meet the neighbours.

Despite the shock of experiencing the worst earthquake to hit Melbourne in almost 200 years, protests are still taking place in the city today. You can follow that news with my colleague Matilda Boseley here.

'Probably the largest earthquake' around Melbourne in 200 years, says expert

Dr Januka Attanayake, the research lead with the University of Melbourne’s Earthquake Seismology Earth Sciences unit, said preliminary estimates had the earthquake as a magnitude 5.8 to 6.0.

“If these preliminary estimates are correct, it is probably the largest earthquake we have felt around Melbourne in the last 175 to 200 years,” Attanayake said. “If it’s a magnitude 6.0, it’s the first in hundreds of years. This is the first earthquake of this magnitude I have seen here during my lifetime, and it has probably not been seen during the lifetime of several generations.

“We record about 400 earthquakes less than magnitude 2.5 every year,” he said. “So earthquakes are not an exception.”

Usually Attanayake and his team would put out more seismometers in the aftermath to try and detect aftershocks, which can last for months, but due to Covid-19 travel and work restrictions this was not possible, he said. Two significant aftershocks of 2.5 and 3.0 have already been detected by existing seismometers.

“It’s important work because if we can detect aftershocks we can detect the fault area that ruptured,” he said. “We need to know this information for proper future hazard analysis. It helps us detect expected ground motions of earthquakes going forward. This is essential information for engineers building city structures in future, as we can for example say how much ground motion can be expected at a given location over the next 50 years.”

Emergency services on scene after Betty’s Burgers on Chapel Street in Windsor was damaged following an earthquake.
Emergency services on scene after Betty’s Burgers on Chapel Street in Windsor was damaged following an earthquake. Photograph: James Ross/EPA

Updated

Reporter Donna Lu is outside Betty’s Burgers on Chapel Street in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor, where the top half of the wall from the second story fell down during the quake.

She spoke to local resident Josh Sinclair, who described the sound of the brickwork coming down like “a train going past”.

“When we came out there was smoke everywhere,” he said.

His house is still without power.

Updated

Mansfield Hotel manager Guy Haston fears there will be aftershocks later on in the day.

“Considering I originally come from Christchurch I’m quite used to earthquakes, and it was quite severe,” he said.

“I didn’t get the noise you normally associate with earthquakes but the rocking and rolling was quite severe, it lasted a good 20 seconds or so.”

Haston was in Christchurch for a 5.7 earthquake that he described as a “totally different feeling”.

“In Christchurch it was moving in one direction and then stopped and moved in a different direction, at that stage you thought it’s either going to get worse or stop, and luckily it did.”

Haston was at home when the earthquake struck Mansfield, and drove into town to start his shift early for fear of damage in the shop.

“I can’t see any visible damage, I thought there’s going to be stock down, but I walked in and one bottle fell off the rack and it didn’t even break,” he laughed.

“I thought I’d have a mess to clean up with the severity.”

Let’s go back from New York to Mansfield, near the epicentre of the earthquake.

The Witches Brew Cafe owner Rebecca Douglas was serving customers inside her Mansfield store when the earthquake struck.

“The whole place shook really,” she said.

“Nothing broke, thank goodness, but it was quite concerning. I said perhaps we should move outside just in case, and by that time it was already over.”

Douglas said the tremor, in total, lasted about 15 seconds.

“It started slow, built up and everyone was nervous. We heard this rumble, rumble like a big truck coming through the building,” she said.

“Since then, customers are here and getting lots of phone calls from concerned family and friends everywhere, I’m too busy making coffees but I have plenty of text messages as well.”

Douglas didn’t know if there’d been damage in the area, but believed the tremor was felt “right down to Cann River”, about seven hours south-east of Mansfield.

Morrison was asked how he felt to be out of the country while Australia experienced ‘the largest earthquake it has ever felt’.

(A footnote on that: there was a magnitude 6.1 earthquake reported in the Petermann Ranges region of the Northern Territory, about 125km southwest of Uluru, on 21 May 2016, and a magnitude 6.2 recorded offshore in Collier Bay in Western Australia in 1997.)

Morrison said him being out of the country was “unavoidable”.

This is not predictable. I’m concerned to know the facts and pleased that reports so far that I’ve received are not of serious injuries and things of that nature. That’s very welcome news.

But, of course, these are early reports and I remain concerned and I’ve asked the Deputy Prime Minister and the minister to keep me informed of developments.

Emergency Management Australia are liaising with state authorities. These are very professional people. Regardless of whether it’s a flood, bushfire ,earthquake or cyclone, we have some of the best disaster response agencies anywhere in the world if not the best. And I know that those who may be in distress tonight — during the day there in Melbourne and across Victoria today will be well looked after and well attended to in terms of any needs that they have.

Scott Morrison promises federal assistance for earthquake response

Scott Morrison has just addressed travelling reporters in Washington about the earthquake.

He says the reports he’s seen to date don’t point to “serious injuries or things of that nature” and that is “very welcome news”.

He said Emergency Management Australia is liaising with state authorities, and the acting prime minister Barnaby Joyce is keeping him informed.

The federal government is ready to “to provide whatever assistance is needed, whether from the ADF or others”.

He said anyone in distress in Melbourne or beyond will be “well looked after”.

Morrison also said he’s been in contact with the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews.

Earthquake felt like a 'loud crash' in Mansfield, locals say

Mansfield Rudolf Steiner School and Kindergarten administrator Maisie Pilli was standing with her co-worker when she heard a “loud crash”.

“To me it sounded like a truck was going to crash into the building, and it wasn’t until me and my co-worker looked at each other and thought it was an earthquake that we ran to a doorway and stood there together,” she said.

Pilli felt the tremor for about 30 to 45 seconds, and was relieved the kindergarteners were off on school holidays.

“Everything was fairly sturdy, we didn’t see any damage, but we had a look around afterwards and nothing went too far off the shelves, the only thing we saw outside was a few water-tanks shaking,” she said.

Pilli said all Mansfield community noticeboards were “going off the charts”, with most people having had a similar experience.

“One of my friends with horses says all the horses went crazy and weren’t enjoying it,” she laughed.

“My poor dog’s at home and I know she’ll be thinking ‘what’s going on’?

“We really weren’t prepared for it being in our location, I think we’d jump under desks instead of a doorway next time.”

Damaged buildings following an earthquake along Chapel Street in Melbourne.
Damaged buildings following an earthquake along Chapel Street in Melbourne. Photograph: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Updated

Here is another view of some damage in Chapel Street. This building is on the corner of Chapel and Green streets in Windsor.

Guardian Australia reporter Donna Lu has headed to the Chapel Street shopping prescinct in Prahran, where buildings were damaged by the earthquake.

She says that brickwork from an archway on the the Coles building on Wattle Street has fallen to the ground but nobody has been hurt.

Fire and rescue crews have cleared the area and residents are not being allowed to return

Melbourne’s beloved peregrine falcons were also shaken by the earthquake.

They live high on a ledge of a skyscraper at 367 Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD. You can see the one half of the nesting pair look up as the building starts shaking, before flying off.

The Emergency Vic website is also reporting a third earthquake, a magnitude 3.1 event at Rawson, which is just east of the other earthquake sites, on the other side of the Lazarini Spur.

According to Geoscience Australia, that third quake took place at 9.54am at a depth of 4km and registered at 3.1.

The quake was reportedly felt in Canberra as well – ACT chief minister Andrew Barr said the legislative assembly building was shaking.

Canberra is just at the other end of the great dividing range to the epicentre of the earthquake.

The ACT Emergency services agency said tremors from the magnitude 6.0 earthquake were felt “as far away as Canberra and Sydney”.

Our ACTESA Emergency Triple Zero (000) call centre has received a number of calls from concerned community members who have felt the aftershocks.

At this stage, we have no reports of damage within the ACT. Please be assured that the ACTESA is ready to respond to any incident that occurs within the territory.

Updated

The Victorian chief health officer, Brett Sutton, is unimpressed by being visited with another disaster while we’re still in the grips of a pandemic.

According to Geoscience Australia there were two earthquakes recorded in quick succession.

The first, the one felt in Melbourne and Sydney, is now listed as a magnitude 5.8 – a downgrade from earlier reports – at a depth of 10 metres. That took place at 9.15am AEST.

Then there was a magnitude 4 earthquake at 9.33am, at a depth of 12km.

Both occurred between Matlock and Knockwood, in the high country just east of the Yarra Ranges.

Updated

Tremors felt from Sydney to Launceston

The Fire and Rescue Service NSW says they received calls for help across the state, from Alexandria, Manly and Hornsby in Sydney (about 700km north-east of the epicentre) to as far afield as Dubbo (also 700km away, to the north).

And writer Martin Flanagan, who is in Launceston in northern Tasmania, said the tremor was felt there too. It’s also about 700km away from Mansfield, across the Bass Strait.

Updated

Geoscience Australia said the earthquake took place at 9.15am this morning, or 23.15pm universal standard time.

It was recorded in the Mansfield region. Depth 10km, magnitude 6.

Magnitude 6 earthquake recorded in central Victoria

A magnitude 6 earthquake has been recorded in central Victoria, in the high country near Mansfield.

The quake caused building damage in Melbourne, about 200km to the south-east, and tremors were felt as far afield as Temora, north of Wagga Wagga.

It’s the biggest earthquake recorded in Victoria since 1966, when a magnitude 5.7 earthquake was recorded at Mt Hotham.

We’ll bring you all the updates. For now, you can tell me what you know on Twitter @callapilla or via email at calla.wahlquist@theguardian.com

Updated

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