The noise arrived before the movement did.<\/p>\n
People across the metropolitan area describe being woken by a low roar<\/strong> rather than by shaking, which is what a shallow earthquake sounds like from directly above it.<\/p>\n Then the doors and the windows started.<\/p>\n By ten past one the squares were filling up, in a town where almost every window<\/strong> in the street had its light on.<\/p>\n It measured 5.<\/p>\n Which raises the question of how a number that modest ended up being felt four provinces away<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Magnitude and shaking are not the same measurement. Magnitude describes the energy released at the source<\/strong>, once, while what anybody actually feels depends on how deep it was, what the ground underneath is made of, and how far away they were standing.<\/p>\n The Granada earthquake started about 6 miles down<\/strong>, which is shallow.<\/p>\n Shallow means the energy has less rock to cross before it reaches the surface, so it arrives with far more of itself intact. A quake twice as strong at four times the depth can barely be noticed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The ground helps as well. Granada and its metropolitan area sit on the Vega, a basin of soft sediment, and loose material amplifies<\/strong> the waves that pass through it in a way that solid bedrock does not.<\/p>\n The main shock came at 4 minutes past one<\/strong>, with its epicenter under Alhendin.<\/p>\n Six minutes later a second one arrived under Gojar, magnitude 2.6, at a depth of barely half a mile<\/strong>. Then they kept coming.<\/p>\n By morning the national instruments had logged 40 separate tremors<\/strong> across the metropolitan area over the course of the night, fifteen of them clustered in the hours right after the main shock and ranging from 1.6 to 2.6.<\/p>\n They surfaced under Ogijares, La Zubia, Otura, Gojar, Churriana de la Vega, Armilla and Alhendin, which are all towns sitting within a few miles of one another. Three smaller ones had already come through the same ground<\/strong> during Friday, before anybody had reason to pay attention to them.<\/p>\n Emergency lines took more than 200 calls<\/strong>, with over 80 of them going to the regional number.<\/p>\n The regional government moved its seismic risk plan to the first emergency level<\/strong> within the hour, and the advice that went out was narrower than people expected. Not evacuation. Stay calm, stop going in and out of buildings, and keep away from facades, cornices, balconies and walls.<\/p>\n Armilla did something more practical. The town unlocked its parks<\/strong>, which are normally shut overnight, and opened a sports complex so that anyone too uneasy to go back indoors had somewhere to sit down.<\/p>\n The same scene repeated across the metropolitan area and in the city itself, people standing in open squares in the dark<\/strong>, waiting to see whether there would be another one.<\/p>\n The honest answer is that less broke than the night felt like. That gap between how something feels and what it does is the usual pattern<\/strong> with a shallow shock.<\/p>\n The city authority reported no widespread structural damage<\/strong>. What came in was mostly light damage to elements that are not holding anything up, the parts of a building that fall off rather than fall down.<\/p>\n Roof tiles, render, sections of cornice, cracks opening from window corners<\/strong>. Armilla and several other towns in the metropolitan area recorded damage of that kind, and the morning reports<\/a> put the count of serious cases at a level the authorities were still working through.<\/p>\n A handful of buildings did worse, and the pattern there is the one seismologists expect. Older structures, or ones that already had problems<\/strong> before Friday night, in the same way stress deep inside<\/a> a system shows up first wherever the system was weakest.<\/p>\n None of this is new ground for the Vega. All of the overnight epicenters share the same fault zone<\/strong>, which is why they arrived in a cluster rather than scattered.<\/p>\n In January five years ago the same basin produced a seismic swarm<\/strong> that ran for months. The regional plan sat at pre emergency for three months and handled more than 1,600 reports<\/strong> before the ground settled again.<\/p>\n So the useful expectation is not that it stops tonight. Smaller tremors are likely to keep arriving for a while, and the running account<\/a> of them is being updated through the day, much as long term forecasts<\/a> elsewhere get revised rather than resolved.<\/p>\n The regional president wrote on Saturday morning that it had been a night of alarm and unease, and asked people to be careful around any damaged cornice or facade that might still come down.<\/p>\n Nobody was hurt. For a magnitude 5 arriving at one in the morning<\/strong> under a metropolitan area of half a million people, that is the number worth holding on to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The noise arrived before the movement did. People across the metropolitan area describe being woken by a low roar rather than by shaking, which is what a shallow earthquake sounds like from directly above it. Then the doors and the windows started. By ten past one the squares were filling up, in a town where almost every window in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":32655,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"granada earthquake","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why a magnitude 5 traveled that far<\/h2>\n
Forty tremors before daylight<\/h2>\n
What a town does at one in the morning<\/h2>\n
What actually broke<\/h2>\n
The part that has happened before<\/h2>\n