NEW DELHI: “It is my first visit to Delhi as well as a horrible earthquake experience, too,” says a 70-year-old Helen D’souza, who stuck along with her 67-year-old sister at the eleventh floor of a high-rise building in sector 49 of Gurugram, Haryana.
An earthquake of 6.6 at a depth of 156 KM strikes Hindukush Region at 10:17 pm—Epicentre is at 384 KM North West of Srinagar. “While watching TV, I felt I got some weakness due to the long travel from Dubai to Delhi via Mangalore. That’s why my body is trembling,” said Ms. Dsouza. Soon both sisters realised that it was not their body weakness but a severe earthquake.
They saw both ceiling fans of their living rooms start wildly shaking. They hurriedly left her flat but soon realised that their age was not with them to climb down the eleven floors, and she might fall on the way down. Fears and stress brought tears to her eyes as she started narrating her incredible experience.
“People were rushing out from their respective flats and going down with stairs. Our age couldn’t allow us to use stairs, so we returned to our flat while praying to God,” said Ms Dsouza, who has been living in Dubai with her family for past decade.
People started posting videos of shaking fans and chandeliers on social media platforms. Even people who were rushing out of high rises were so afraid as adjacent high rises surround them. Even those who live in narrow lanes or streets with buildings spread over thousands of meters.
“Even if we manage to come out of the building, we are surrounded by buildings and poles from all sides,” says Pawan Pandey, a private security guard who lives in a Mamoora village in Noida. People came out of their houses to roads in Delhi-NCR.
“Some people are so afraid that they don’t want to go inside their high-rises building,” says Ankush Varshney, a resident of Faridabad. “I have experienced earthquakes in the past but the tremors this time were strong and long enough to make me rush out of my apartment with my children...I am scared to sleep now,” Vidhya Bhalla, a resident of Delhi’s New Friends Colony, said on Tuesday night.
Bhalla’s account was echoed by a cross-section of residents of Delhi-NCR after a 6.6 magnitude temblor on Tuesday night was felt across large swathes of northern India after the earthquake struck the Hindukush region in Afghanistan. People in residential colonies and apartments rushed out of their homes as their buildings started started shaking.
Jyoti, a resident of Lajpat Nagar, said she was watching television when she suddenly saw that her TV and sofa were shaking. Initially, she ignored it but when her husband alerted her, she and her family members rushed out of their home. “I ignored it initially but as soon as my husband alerted, I felt the tremors too.
This time it was strong and the sofa I was sitting on started shaking a bit. We rushed outside our home. Thankfully, we are on the ground floor, so in such situations, we have an easy escape,” she said. Meanwhile, relatives also started flooding residents of the national capital with phone calls as soon as the news of earthquake broke out. Standing outside their residences, many of them were busy informing their relatives that they were safe and sound.