Sixth minor quake in a month hits Manchester

A sixth earthquake in a month shook Manchester early yesterday . It caused no structural damage or injuries – but left many residents alarmed by their city's increasingly vigorous seismic activity. The tremor, measuring 2.2 on the Richter scale, struck at 5.46am. Scores of people telephoned the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh to report that they had felt "a strong vibration" shaking their homes for several seconds.

The tremor was centred on the suburb of Denton. Guthri Chesney, the head chef at The Old Rectory hotel in the town, said one couple staying there thought it was haunted after they woke up to find a bottle of wine had fallen off their bedside table during the night and cracked open.

Mr Chesney, 36, said the two guests were in shock as they checked out, adding: "They came downstairs asking if we had ghosts. When they first woke up, they thought they were covered in blood – then they remembered the red wine."

However, John Milmon, 59, the landlord of the nearby Toll Point public house, said he slept through the rumbling and "did not feel a thing". "But then Krakatoa could have been going off and it still wouldn't have woken me up," he added.

Five further earthquakes earlier this month all hit within a one-mile radius of Denton. The Manchester area was hit by a series of 150 tremors beginning in October 2002.

Davie Galloway, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey, said the occurrence was not out of the ordinary. "I wouldn't say it's unusual", he added. "It's part of living in on a dynamic planet. We get 150 to 300 earthquakes in this country every year. We experience earthquakes all over the world but, because Britain is not on the edge of a major plate, we don't experience them on the scale of California or Japan."

Mr Galloway said the recent spate of tremors had probably occurred because the first was not strong enough to release all the tension. "Maybe all the stress hasn't been released from the first earthquake", he said.

Although many more earthquakes had been recorded in recent years, he added, this was most probably because of technological improvements, rather than fundamental seismic changes. "It's a popular myth that earthquakes are becoming more common", he said. "It is really just that there are more seismic instruments to record smaller earthquakes. Records show that larger quakes have occurred with roughly the same frequency throughout history". The five tremors in Manchester earlier this month struck between 10 and 23 August. The largest of these was the first, which measured 2.5 on the Richter scale, and was felt in the centre of Manchester, as well as in Reddish, Didsbury, Failsworth and Denton.

Although all five were said to be relatively slight and almost certainly too small to cause damage, they occurred at a depth of just 5km, which makes them more easily felt. Every year, the BGS records up to 300 earthquakes but only about 25 of these are felt by people.