Global Voices Online

A moderate earthquake jolted Dhaka city on the 27th of July approximately at 00:51 hours Bangladesh Time (+6 GMT). Russell John reports in his blog:

I was lying on my bed talking to a friend on the phone, and I suddenly felt that the bed was shaking. Within 3 seconds, it stopped. My first impression was that a cat got under my bed and it was shaking it, but then I realised that it's impossible as the bed is way too heavy. (Plus there was no cat, I checked!)

I quickly asked my friends on IRC, and they said they felt it too.

So it was an earthquake for real! Quake in Dhaka at 12:51 AM!

Russell tweeted instantaneously:

Oh my God, I just felt an earthquake!

Within next minutes, tweets started to appear confirming that they also felt the earthquake.

Munaz of Nothing to Lose and Nothing to Gain shared the tweeter feeds of some of his friends:

Information online was hard to come by (except some Bangla blogs) and everybody was trying to get updates. So Bauani of Information blog contacted U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center and posted the find:

Magnitude: 4.9
Date-Time: Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 18:51:49 UTC
Location: 24.773°N, 90.480°E
Depth: 5.2 km (3.2 miles) (poorly constrained)
Region: BANGLADESH

He was also posting the updates as and when available.

Apparently no casualties were reported but it rattled the affected people of Dhaka, a populous mega city.

Rumi of In The Middle of Nowhere writes:

Map of all the major and minor tectonic plates of the world

If you can locate Bangladesh in the world map, you will see two plate boundaries, i.e. two fault lines cross Bangladesh….many scientists have been warning about the probability of a devastating 8-9 Richter scale catastrophic earthquake in the northeastern and southeastern parts of Bangladesh.

So, (a) major earthquake is also possible in Bangladesh. Are we ready?