Finally, the BBC have a news article covering the earthquake:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8086821.stm

I’m less impressed with ‘Rory Mainwaring’ who says he “actually blacked out and his armchair smashed into the computer.”. Come on… it wasn’t *that* bad!

The BGS site has now recorded an observed quake event, and it registered a magnitude of 3.0 on the Richter scale (again, click to view in full size).

The data was taken from http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/recent_events/recent_events.html but this page shows only the most recent 5 which is why I took a screen shot. The epicentre was pretty close to where we live, only a few miles north:

 The BGS released this statement about it:

SEISMIC ALERT: PORT TALBOT, SOUTH WALES  5 JUNE 2009 19:42 UTC (20:42 BST)

BGS have received several reports from the media and residents of Bridgend, South Wales, of a felt event at approximately 19:42 UTC. The felt reports described “lying in bed and metal frame shook”, “the whole house creeked and it felt like it moved”, “the experience felt like a car had collided with the house” and “heard rumbling sound”. 

The following preliminary information is available for this earthquake:

DATE : 5 June 2009
ORIGIN TIME : 19:42 07.1s UTC
LAT/LON : 51.637° North / 3.648 ° West
GRID REF : 285.97 kmE / 194.47 kmN
DEPTH : 8.1 km
MAGNITUDE : 3.0 ML
LOCALITY : 10 km NE of Port Talbot, South Wales
INTENSITY : 3 EMS
COMMENTS : Felt in Bridgend, South Wales

This is the largest event to occur in this area since a magnitude 3.8 earthquake on 23 May 1975, approximately 7 km southwest of Merthyr Tydfil. Historically, however, larger earthquakes, with magnitudes ranging from 4.9 to 5.2, have been known to occur to the west of this evening’s event, the last and largest of these being a magnitude 5.2 that occurred in 1906 close to Port Talbot. Known as the Swansea earthquake, this was one of the most damaging earthquakes in Britain in the whole of the 20th century.

Click here to view a pdf of a seismogram of the earthquake, as recorded on the BGS broadband seismometer at Hartland and a map showing the seismicity of the area since 1727.

Issued 5 June 2009.

I can’t find any local news articles this morning making a mention of the earthquake last night, but I did do a bit of research and found this chart from yesterday (click to view in full detail):

It was taken from the Michaelchurch monitoring station (http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/helicorder/heli.html) on the British Geological Survey’s web site, and you can definitly see a rumble on the graph yesterday evening! I continue the search….

About half an hour ago, while I was sitting nice and relaxed on my sofa, the lights flashed, I heard a bang, and the whole house shook for a fraction of a second. So.. was it an earthquake? I’m not sure yet. The mother-in-law wasn’t sure what it was but Colin next door to her thought it was a car crashing in to their house at first. Nope… wasn’t that. Colin also suspected it may have been something at the steel works down the road but I have been to the edge of the village and can’t see any unusual smoke.. only what looks like normal steam output. So, if anyone else felt the quake please let me know cuz it was an unusual one. Most quakes I’ve felt last a second and are more like a rumble. Anyway, I’ll keep investigating and update when I know more.