A magnitude 4.6 earthquake struck the New South Wales Hunter Valley early on Wednesday morning, jolting awake residents across a wide swathe of eastern Australia, including parts of Sydney and Canberra.
The quake hit at 2.55am local time on Wednesday near the town of Singleton, 200km north of Sydney, at a shallow depth of 10km, according to Geoscience Australia.
Its preliminary magnitude was measured at 5.1 but was later revised down to 4.6.
No injuries or serious property damage was reported but some 3,800 people reported feeling the tremors from as far as Canberra and Tamworth.
The New South Wales State Emergency Service said it received several calls from concerned residents, though it responded to just one incident of a burst water pipe in Rutherford near Maitland that required sandbagging.
Australia is not known for frequent large earthquakes but does experience moderate seismic activity, particularly in regions like the Hunter Valley.
Phil Cummins, senior seismologist at Geoscience Australia, said Wednesday’s earthquake was “pretty large for Australia”.
"I would certainly say it's significant,” he was quoted as saying by ABC News.
The quake’s epicentre has been located about 36km from Liddell, the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station and one of seven locations where the federal opposition has proposed building a nuclear power plant if elected.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton last year named Liddell as a candidate for Australia’s first nuclear energy facility under the Coalition’s plan to replace ageing coal infrastructure with nuclear reactors. The site has since come to be a flashpoint in the national energy debate.
While the earthquake caused minimal physical impact, its proximity to the proposed nuclear development site immediately reignited concerns over the safety of building reactors in seismically active zones.
In Sydney, the quake was felt most noticeably in highrise buildings, where the movement was amplified.
“If you are on the 30th floor, you will usually feel an earthquake more than someone in a bungalow,” Dr Ehsan Noroozinejad Farsangi, an earthquake specialist, told The Guardian. “That extra wobble is a feature, not a flaw.”
Authorities said aftershocks could be felt in the coming days, though none had been confirmed so far.
The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre confirmed there was no tsunami threat from the quake.
Geoscience Australia has recorded at least 11 quakes of magnitude 3 or higher in the Hunter Valley over the past year, part of a broader uptick in activity in the region.
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