Quake measuring 4.3 hits New Delhi, surrounding areas

Posted 11 26 2007 7:14PM

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An earthquake measuring 4.3 hit New Delhi and its surrounding areas at dawn on Monday, shaking high-rise buildings, the weather office and Reuters witnesses said.

The epicentre of the tremor, felt at 4:43 a.m., was near the border of New Delhi and the neighbouring state of Haryana, which surrounds the capital on its north, west and south.

The U.S. Geological Survey put the time of the earthquake at 4:47 a.m. and said it measured 4.6, and was at a depth of 10 km.

One local TV channel said there were some cracks in buildings near the epicentre but the report could not be independently confirmed. There were no reports of any major damage elsewhere across the city of 14 million people.

People in many areas were shaken out of their beds and gathered in open spaces as their doors and windows rattled violently, the Hindi language Star News channel said.

"It's been about an hour now, but we still don't know if we should go into our homes. We are so scared," Dinesh, a resident of a Delhi suburb who gave only one name, told Star News.

The Indian capital city and its surrounding areas lie in Zone 4 of an earthquake danger chart on which Zone 5 is most prone to quakes.

A tremor of a similar magnitude hit India's financial capital of Mumbai and the surrounding Konkan region on Saturday but caused no damage.

An earthquake of magnitude 7.7 struck Gujarat in 2001, killing nearly 20,000 people and causing damage in neighbouring Pakistan. The quake affected 15.9 million people in 7,900 villages.

In 2005, about 1,500 people were killed in a quake in Indian Kashmir. That quake, which measured 7.6 and had its epicentre across the Himalayan frontier, killed about 73,000 people in Pakistan.