England Earthquake

If you had actually felt the earthquake, I suspect you may have had a different opinion. I was on here when it happened and I can tell you it was bloody frightening. Feeling the building you're in shaking that violently is not at all pleasant. With the accompanying deep rumbling sound and all the doors rattling, it really did feel like the Earth was opening up. It's not something I want to experience ever again.

Oh bloody hell! I survived the Folkestone quake. It wasn't that bad last night i know. Seeing as there is about the same amount of carnage.
Get a grip. You'll get bored talking about it in a day or 2.

That's what got me this morning - "Send us your mobile phone footage!" Seriously, what the hell? Footage of what, exactly? My initial reaction upon waking was to think that the boiler was about to explode, not to get out of bed, go downstairs and rummage around in my handbag for my phone. By which point the 'crisis' would have been long over and the only footage I would have got would have been of a silent, deserted street.

Who really cares in this instance about grainy mobile phone video (probably faked - it's not exactly a hard situation to recreate) of some random person going "oh, the room is shaking a bit"?

Some people have CCTV cameras installed outside their house.

So I was awake and was watching/listening to a mixture of News 24, Sky News, 5live and Lincs FM.

I thought News 24 handled it pretty well considering they were in World-mode.

I thought Faye Barker was bloody awful considering she has supposedly worked in the Calendar region in the past she seemed to struggle with places and their names and where they are in relation to each other. The rest of Sky wasn't much better, first identifying the epicentre as Hull on a graphic when they had already said where it actually was (I sent them an email telling them to sort it out).

The radio, both national and local, did much better (as I expected them to have).

Yeah, I just saw a load of 'exciting' CCTV footage on East Midlands Today of some wobbling beer cans and a couple of parked cars.

To capture what ? a few chimney breasts tumbling to the ground in the dark and not a pedestrian in harms way.

Some people just have CCTV cameras to feel safe, not really in the event of an earthquake. But it is pointless to ask for clips.

The 'England' earthquake was seemingly felt in Edinburgh 'Scotland' as well.

Remind me again because I think I missed this one. Since when is 12:56am regarded as four minutes to midnight??? According to Sky News' script that's what 12:56am (which the graphic says) is.

True, earthquakes are unpleasant. However, they aren't too rare an occurence in the UK, which is why they are, compared with earthquakes in other parts of the world, less intense.

Whilst I understand that 5.2ML is a rather large earthquake, and it must have been quite frightening, not very much happened. A few buildings suffered structural damage, and that was about it. Only one person was seriously injured, and that's because his chimney stack collapsed.

@miss hellfire: the Folkestone earthquake isn't a good measure against this earthquake. The Richter scale of magnitude (or the ML scale) is base-10 logarithmic: that is, each 1 it goes up by means the amount of energy output goes up in multiples (I believe multiples of ten).

To put this into perspective, 1 on the Richter Scale is roughly equivalent to 30kG of TNT being exploded underground: around the same as a construction site blast.

2.5 is around 5600kG of TNT underground, roughly equivalent to the explosive power of a World War II blockbuster bomb.

4.0 is around 1000000kG of TNT underground (around the size of a small atomic bomb, eg an atomic missile).

5.0 is around 32000000kG of TNT. That's equivalent to the Nagasaki atomic bomb being detonated underground.

9.3 (the Indian Ocean quake of 2004) is equivalent to roughly 115000000000kG of TNT, outputting around 135 exajoules of energy - more than the National Grid outputs at full capacity, I believe.

So the earthquake experienced in the North was roughly 10 times larger than that of Folkestone. That's why I can understand a bit more coverage in this case, although I still believe it has been blown out of all proportion.

I feel the coverage today has been spot on, except for pointless pleas for mobile phone footage

You say nothing happened, well something obviously did happen, there was an earthquake. It was probably topic of conversation for most of the population today, more than various other news stories I've seen broadcast