Duisburg/Gelsenkirchen.
A false earthquake warning has kept the police in many district cities in suspense. Was the fake news caused by an earthquake in Romania?
The police in Gelsenkirchen checked again. “We received the first call at 10:42 p.m.,” says spokesman Thomas Nowaczyk. The caller said with concern that there had been a warning of an earthquake in the Ruhr area on the Internet. What now? At first glance, colleagues in the control center “thought it was a prank,” says Nowaczyk. 58 calls later, they know it’s not. All callers tell almost the same story. Sometimes they received the warning via Whatsapp, sometimes received it on TicToc or read it in one of their Facebook groups. And all callers have one thing in common. They originally come from Romania or Bulgaria.
“Have experienced something like never before”
“We have never experienced anything like this,” says the Gelsenkirchen police spokesman. No police in the station has seen anything like this before. In Duisburg there are 170 calls. Even at the police stations in Bochum, Gladbeck or Hagen, the phones almost ring all the time. The calls get more and more excited. “Some were really in a panic,” Nowaczyk knows. Cologne is already badly damaged, now the quake is moving to the Ruhr area, many callers have read on the Internet and even know the time of the disaster: 2.45 a.m. “Where can we flee to?”
The police tried to calm down, speaking of a false report. It does not help. Around midnight, around 200 people in Gladbeck left their homes for fear of collapsing buildings and are waiting outside for the announced earthquake. In Gelsenkirchen they sit in their cars with children and the most necessary luggage so that they can escape quickly if the worst comes to the worst.
Loudspeaker announcements are meant to calm people down
And in Duisburg, the police count around 1,000 people on the streets in parts of the city with a corresponding population structure. The officials repeatedly give the all-clear with loudspeaker announcements. “Go home. There is no earthquake.” But most of them stay. No one became aggressive, says Duisburg police spokeswoman Caroline Schlachzig. “There was a rather worried mood.” Most people only returned to their homes well after 2.45 a.m.
So far it is unclear where the origin of the false report lies. It might not even have been malicious intent. Experts from the “Earthquake News” website point out that the earth has actually trembled several times in Romania in the past few days – on Tuesday with a magnitude of 5.7. Although the consequences are not nearly as dramatic as in Turkey and Syria, several hundred buildings were also damaged in Romania and two people were injured.
Warning from Romania for relatives in the area?
Earthquake News geologist Stefan Stürmer suspects that people from Romania have warned relatives or friends in Germany that Germany will be affected next. Perhaps because they skimmed posts instead of reading them, misinterpreted maps and graphics, or misattributed images.
Kasper D. Fischer, head of the earthquake station at the Ruhr University in Bochum, knows that most people would not normally concern themselves with geology and earthquakes. Otherwise they would know what Fischer and other experts have been saying for a long time: “The risk of earthquakes in large parts of NRW is very low.”
Tremors cannot be predicted at all
Only the western parts of the country, in particular the Lower Rhine Bay, the Eifel and parts of the Bergisches Land, are officially assigned to an earthquake risk zone. Experts from RWTH Aachen University have calculated that there is even “a certain risk of moderately severe earthquakes” around Aachen – although they only occur once every 3,000 to 5,000 years.
Experts consider the earthquake in Roermond in the Netherlands, directly on the border with Germany, to be the strongest earthquake in the vicinity in the past 100 years, which also caused damage in North Rhine-Westphalia. However, with a magnitude of 5.4, it was about 1,000 times weaker than the most recent tremor in eastern Turkey.
But even if you disregard all probability calculations and tectonic expertise, you should ignore warnings of earthquakes on the Internet, because: According to experts, earthquakes cannot be predicted at all.
More articles from this category can be found here: Rhine and Ruhr
