2023-06-17 12:45:36
An event of this magnitude is particularly rare in mainland France. An earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5 was felt in the west of the country on Friday. The earthquake occurred at 6:38 p.m. near the towns of Surgères (Charente-Maritime) and Mauzé-sur-le-Mignon (Deux-Sèvres), halfway between La Rochelle and Niort, near the Marais poitevin.
It was of a magnitude of 5.3 according to the National Seismic Monitoring Network (Renass). The Department of Analysis, Surveillance, Environment (Dase) of the Commissariat for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA) for its part evokes a magnitude of 5.8, as does the French Central Seismological Bureau (BCSF), which published a warning of “very strong earthquake”.
The effects of the earthquake were felt over several hundred kilometres, notably in Rennes, Nantes, Limoges, Angers and even, further south, in Bordeaux. “This is one of the strongest earthquakes recorded on metropolitan territory,” said on Twitter the Minister of Ecological Transition Christophe Béchu. The last big earthquake dates back to 2002, when a 5.4 earthquake shook Brittany.
“As if an elephant had tumbled down the stairs”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing, testifies Jean-Marc, retired at Lucs-sur-Boulogne, in Vendée. The house shook twice. I thought a car had smashed through the wall. I went to check in all the rooms upstairs, convinced that the ceiling had fallen, and I went out to check that the chimney was intact. »
For Alice, 14, it was a baptism. “Everything suddenly started to shake, the windows, the parquet floor… It’s as if an elephant had tumbled down the stairs. I was scared, but it only lasted a few seconds” testifies the teenager residing near Essarts (Vendée), about sixty kilometers north of the alleged epicentre.
From Niort, Jérôme found that the noise sounded like “something you can know”, like “a truck, an explosion”, but “much louder”. “We saw the house shake! We thought the windows were going to break, ”says this 36-year-old man. “It was a kind of explosion, followed by a rumble,” adds Valérie, 55, who lives in Aiffres, 5 km south of Niort.
A minor injury
A lightly injured person was taken care of by the emergency services, announced in the evening. the prefecture of Deux-Sèvres. Numerous material damages were reported in the south-west of the department. “Some buildings may have been affected (rock falls, cracks),” said the prefecture.
In Charente-Maritime, the first “elements collected by the firefighters and the police do not report any casualties”, a assured the prefecture. “On the other hand, numerous material damages such as cracks have been reported on buildings and 1,100 homes are currently without electricity, a high voltage line having been affected,” she added.
The Charente-Maritime firefighters, “faced with a large number of calls”, published a press release asking to “contact the emergency services only out of emergency”. In Loire-Atlantique, “the earthquake generated more than a hundred calls without any intervention”, according to the firefighters.
“Zone of moderate seismicity”
In mainland France, earthquakes with a magnitude equal to or greater than 5 are rare. The previous one dates back to 2019 in the Drôme. But the earth shakes regularly from Brittany to New Aquitaine. Half a dozen departments in this region are classified as “moderate seismicity zones”.
“The paradox of this seismic region is that it has been stable from a geological point of view for several hundred million years, explained to us in February 2018 Mickaël Bonnin, seismologist at the Seismological Observatory of Nantes. But the structure of the earth’s crust was strongly disturbed there by tectonic activity, about 250 million years ago. There are therefore many faults and the crust is very fragmented. It’s these little flaws that are playing regularly and cause earthquakes. »
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