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Earthquake rocks nation in early hours of morning

A collapsed temple in Lotung after the strong earthquake yesterday morning. PHOTO: CNA

People across the country received a rude awakening in the early hours of yesterday morning as an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale shook the nation at 1.51am.

The quake lasted almost a minute with an aftershock of magnitude 5.7 striking four minutes later.

No casualties were reported as of press time, but there was a report of a collapsed concrete gate at a 40-year-old temple in Ilan.

Hsinchu County police said yesterday there was no damage in the Hsinchu Science Park -- known as "Taiwan's Silicon Valley" -- in the wake of yesterday's quake.

The nation's biggest telecom operator Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) said the earthquake had caused minor damage to an undersea cable and caused telecom service congestion between Taiwan and neighboring countries.

All affected telecom services including voice, Internet access and data transmission were back to normal yesterday afternoon after the company diverted the traffic to unaffected cables or routers, Chunghwa Telecom said in a statement.

An optical cable located on the seabed off Hualien was damaged by the quake, the carrier said.

Traffic to Japan, Korea and Hong Kong was gridlocked because of the damage, said an official from the company's public relation department by phone.

"Fortunately, the damage is minor compared with that caused by quakes last year," the official said.

Chunghwa Telecom said it would send a cable ship to the scene to perform repairs. It expected the repairs to be completed within three weeks.

Last December, a string of strong earthquakes off Taiwan affected undersea cables linking Taiwan to the rest of the world, disrupting all telecom services and Web access.

To minimize damage from natural disasters, Chunghwa Telecom plans to join other telecom operators in the construction of a new US$500 million undersea fiber-optic cable across the Pacific Ocean.

Lu Pei-ling (呂佩玲), deputy director of the Central Weather Bureau's seismology center, said the epicenter of yesterday's earthquake was located 74km southeast of the bureau's observation center in Nanao (南澳), Ilan County, at a depth of 27km.

Lu said the epicenter of yesterday's earthquake and aftershocks was on the same seismic belt as that of a quake on March 31, 2002, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale.

Yesterday's earthquake was felt most strongly in Ilan, Hualien and Taitung Counties, with a magnitude reaching five, the bureau said.

The magnitude topped four in Taichung County, three in Chiayi County and Taipei City, two in Tainan County, three in Kaohsiung County and two in Taipei County.

Lu said that the earthquake happened as the tectonic plate from the Philippines moved toward the Eurasian tectonic plate, leading to subduction.

Subduction is a seismological term used to describe a phenomenon where one tectonic plate slides beneath the other and moves downwards.

The bureau has cautioned that the chance of aftershocks remains high for the rest of the week. The public is advised to watch for falling rocks when traveling in mountainous areas.

Three earthquakes of similar magnitude have occurred so far this year. Besides yesterday's, one struck in January and the other in July. They were measured at 6.2 and 6, respectively, on the Richter scale.
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