Three earthquakes, with two having their epicentres close to Dhaka, jolted the capital and parts of Bangladesh within a span of 14 hours on Friday night and Saturday, according to news agencies bdnews24.com and the United News of Bangladesh.
The Met Office had said the first earthquake, measuring 2.7 on the Richter scale, was felt about 10:45pm on Friday.
The second, which measured 4.8 on the scale, shook buildings across Dhaka at 11:25pm on Friday.
The earthquakes panicked Dhaka residents. Many came out on the road during the second earthquake.
The epicentre of the first earthquake was in Narayanganj, between Dhaka and Comilla — 45km southeast off Dhaka and 50km west off Comilla, according to the US Geological Survey.
The epicentre of the second tremor was 71km southwest off Dhaka, between Madaripur and Gopalganj, according to meteorologist Kamrul Hasan.
The third earthquake, which measured 5.2 on the Richter scale, was felt at 1:02pm on Saturday, 14 hours inside the first one, in the country’s north such as Dinajpur, Kurigram, Sherpur and Jamalpur. The epicentre of the earthquake was in India’s Assam-Meghalaya border region.
People in districts such as Bagerhat, Brahmanbaria, Chandpur, Gazipur, Gopalganj, Jhenaidah, Khulna, Laksmipur, Madaripur, Munshiganj, Natore, Noakhali, Narsinghdi, Shariatpur and Tangail felt the earthquakes.
‘I woke up as my bed was shaking,’ Rahmat Ullah, a resident of Uttara in the capital, told New Age after the second tremor. ‘Many people ran out to the streets.’
Cracks appeared in two multi-storey commercial buildings in Narayanganj. In Chandpur, a building inclined and another cracked.
