Powerful Quake Leaves Iceland Residents Homeless, Cleanup Effort Begins
Pastor Dale Morgan
Powerful Quake Leaves Iceland Residents Homeless, Cleanup Effort Begins*
Friday , May 30, 2008
AP
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Residents of southwest Iceland cleaned up Friday
after a powerful earthquake left some homes uninhabitable and caused
injuries to about 30 people.
The injuries included a couple of broken legs and fractured hands, said
Vidir Reynisson, manager of the Civil Protection Department.
Reynisson said between 10 and 20 homes were unsafe because of cracked
walls and broken windows, but he did not have a precise count.
The tremor that struck Thursday afternoon had a magnitude of 6.2,
according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The worst damage was mainly to
building interiors in Hveragerdi and Selfoss, about 30 miles east of the
capital, Reykjavik.
"There was a lot of damage inside buildings, things were thrown from the
shelves, but no collapsed homes," Reynisson said. Some sheep were killed
when an outbuilding collapsed, he added.
The jolt also opened a steaming new fissure in an area of geothermal
springs. That was not a problem, Reynisson said, because it was within
an already enclosed area of springs.
"The concentration now is on how to get the social relief that is
needed, and we are now planning how to set up an information center," he
said in a telephone interview.
Visitors to Iceland took Thursday's big tremor in stride.
"I travel all over the world and I tend to bring rain everywhere I go,"
said Lorre Napoli, a microbiologist from Phoenix, Arizona. "This is the
first time I've felt maybe I brought an earthquake to Iceland, because I
asked the driver and he said there hadn't been one for quite a while."
"I'm not really worried, because I've been sleeping outside," said
Davide Giammaria, 30, a bus driver from Rome who was on a camping trip.
"I'm not sleeping in a building. So nothing can fall on me."
Iceland, population 300,000, is a geologically unstable volcanic island
in the north Atlantic.
The country's last major earthquake, in June 2000, measured 6.6 on the
Richter scale. It knocked down a dozen houses but caused no serious
injuries.