[23 SEP 00] CRIMES, FIRES & ACCIDENTS
Earthquake In Budbrooke

An earthquake shook Coventry and Warwickshire this morning, rattling windows and waking people up.

The tremor, measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale, was the largest in this country for ten years.

Its epicentre was in Budbrooke, near Warwick, but the effects could be felt 30 miles away.

More than 50 people rang police after they were shaken awake at 5.30am. Some thought there had been an explosion as their houses had been shaken.

Seismologists said the tremor could have caused windows to rattle and possibly plaster to crack, but it wouldn't have caused any major structural damage to buildings.

Seismologist Glenn Ford of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh said the quake was 60,000 times smaller than the one which brought devastation to Turkey last year.

It is the strongest tremor in Britain since one in 1990 in Shropshire, which measured 5.1 on the scale.

The last significant earthquake in Coventry or Warwickshire was a magnitude 3.0 earthquake in May 1994 centred near Stratford-upon-Avon, 17 km to the south west of Budbrooke.

There are over 200 tremors in this country every year, but many of them do not register on the scale.