Trinidad and To­ba­go was rocked by a mag­ni­tude 5.5 earth­quake at 8.41 pm on Sun­day, ac­cord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre (UWI-SRC). Shak­ing from this earth­quake was felt as far away as Grena­da.

Ac­cord­ing to the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM), there were no re­ports of dam­age or in­juries, and no re­quests for as­sis­tance arose from the event. They in­di­cat­ed that the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) con­duct­ed a check on its net­work in the af­ter­math of the earth­quake, which found no is­sues.

The main earth­quake was fol­lowed by two af­ter­shocks of 3.8 and 4.4 mag­ni­tudes, oc­cur­ring at 10.08 pm (May 11) and 2.49 am (May 12), re­spec­tive­ly. UWI-SRC da­ta in­di­cat­ed that this was the 15th earth­quake greater than 3.4 mag­ni­tude with­in the last month and with­in 150 kilo­me­tres of Port-of-Spain.

Last week, UWI- SRC host­ed a Ques­tion-and-An­swer ses­sion on their Face­book page with Dr Il­ias Pa­padopou­los, En­gi­neer­ing Seis­mol­o­gist. He in­di­cat­ed that “the re­gion has al­ways been ac­tive. Late­ly, we have ob­served slight­ly el­e­vat­ed ac­tiv­i­ty, but this is nor­mal.”

In re­sponse to a ques­tion about the re­cent ac­tiv­i­ty be­ing an in­di­ca­tion of the next ‘big one’, Pa­padopou­los said, “an in­crease does not mean a large event is im­mi­nent. The im­por­tant thing to bear in mind is that the re­gion is known to have pro­duced large mag­ni­tude earth­quakes in the past and will do so in the fu­ture, there­fore, pre­pared­ness is a nec­es­sary part of liv­ing with the earth­quake haz­ard.”

On their web­site, UWI-SRC ad­vised cit­i­zens to stay calm, be alert and not pan­ic dur­ing an earth­quake. If in­side, it said to get un­der some­thing stur­dy and hold on (Drop, Cov­er and Hold On). If out­side, and there are no ob­vi­ous signs of dan­ger, stay there, but away from glass build­ings, util­i­ty poles and bridges. Al­so, if in a ve­hi­cle, do not stop on or un­der a bridge.