Shake, Rattle & Roll


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "New Warsaw Express"

Shake, Rattle & Roll
Residents of northern Poland were jolted out of the post-tourist-season torpor on Tuesday by two earthquakes strong enough to make their furniture jump around and cause cracks in the walls of some buildings.
No casualties were reported from the tremors under the Baltic Sea, the first of which hit just after 1 p.m., and registered between 4.0 and 5.0 on the Richter scale.
The second, which happened around 3:30, topped 5.0, or roughly 1/100th of the magnitude of the 1989 World Series earthquake in San Francisco, which came in around 7 on the logarithmic scale.
“There were vibrations as if a large, heavy truck was driving past my house – except there was no traffic at the time,” Gdynia resident Katarzyna Lemanska told Super Express daily, describing a feeling that anyone who's lived in an earthquake zone can identify with.
“I was on the phone when I felt a light jolt. People started running to me, saying the furniture was shifting... I told them to evacuate and I locked the building,” said Jadwiga Turkowska, who works in the Europa shopping centre in Olsztyn.
Earthquakes are a rarity in Poland, particularly in the north; the most recent noticeable tremors were in the mountains in the south in the early 1990s, and some scientists say Tuesday's ruction was the biggest jolt delivered to northern Poland in 600 years.
Several newspapers quoted Jan Dlugosz's medieval Chronicles, which include this description of a 1443 earthquake epicentred north of Wroclaw: “Towers and buildings fell to the earth, rivers jumped out of their beds and people in the grip of fear took leave of their senses.”
This time around, fire brigades were put on alert and called out to some cases of structural damage, but besides calming panicked residents there wasn't a whole lot for them to do, as not one injury was reported.
Seismologists still aren't sure what caused the earth to move, but some say Scandinavia is the most likely culprit. Apparently the land mass best known as the home of peaceful social democracy has been rising for hundreds of thousands of years, occasionally causing destruction and panic along the way.
Reporters immediately started wondering if something nasty might have exploded in Kaliningrad, one of the most heavily militarised chunks of land in the world.
But although the epicentre was close to a big naval base, so far there's no evidence that human activity caused the shaking.
Russia's government has issued official denials, and Kaliningrad businessman Yevgeny Popov showed a flair for inductive analysis when talking with Rzeczpospolita daily: “If it were an explosion at the base, we would have felt it more – the windows would have been blown out, or something.”
Andrew Powers

jolted – shaken, surprised
torpor – inactivity, laziness
casualties – victims, damage
topped – was above, rose above
culprit – someone responsible for a crime or other malevolence, guilty party
chunks – bits, pieces

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