Magnitude 5.6 earthquake strikes Western Australia: Tremors hit Gnowangerup and rattles homes as far away as Perth
A huge earthquake has rocked the southern region of Western Australia, rattling homes as far away as Perth.
The 5.6 magnitude earthquake was recorded at a depth of 5km in the small WA town of Gnowangerup, located between Katanning and Albany, by Geoscience Australia at 5.34am on Sunday.
It has generated almost 2,000 ‘felt’ reports, with people taking to social media to claim they experienced tremors as far north as Perth. The earthquake lasted around 30 seconds.
One woman said she was literally shaken from her bed and her dogs ‘going crazy’.
‘It sounded like a train coming,’ she wrote.
The 5.6 magnitude earthquake was recorded at a depth of 5km in the small WA town of Gnowangerup, located between Katanning and Albany, by Geoscience Australia at 5.34am on Sunday (pictured)
People took to social media to share their experiences of the tremors, with many claiming they were shaken from their beds
Many people far from the epicentre claimed they felt the tremors.
‘Did anyone else in Perth feel that shake around 530-540 this morning?’, wrote one Facebook user.
‘Felt like an earthquake, not a big one but enough to shake the house.’
Jayde Franklin felt the quake in her apartment in Perth.
‘I felt it 15 storeys up and it was swaying the building,’ she told the ABC.
Another person living in High Wycombe in Perth’s east said their ‘wooden blinds rattled plus the birds outside went very quiet’.
A mother living in Kukerin, a small town in the Wheatbelt region around 300 kilometres south-east of Perth, said the force of the quake had woken her family up.
‘Woke us all up, windows were shaking, pictures moving and the doors were rattling,’ she said.
The most powerful earthquake to hit Western Australia was the Meckering earthquake in 1968 — a 6.5-magnitude quake by today’s standards.