Five consecutive earthquakes with a magnitude of up to 6.2 shake India, Nepal and Afghanistan

The National Center for Seismology of India (NCS) recorded this Tuesday five consecutive earthquakes between 2.7 and 6.2 with epicenters in India and Nepal, where some material damage has been reported.

The third, the largest, occurred at 14:51 local time (09:21 GMT) at a depth of five kilometers with an epicenter in western Nepal. according to NCS.

Another tremor of magnitude 4.6 at a depth of ten kilometers was recorded half an hour earlier at the same location, while two others of magnitude 4.3 and 3.0 were recorded in the northern Indian states of Uttarakhand and Assam respectively. , the Indian agency reported.

NCS also recorded another earthquake at 16:29 local time (10:59 GMT) with a magnitude of 4.7 at a depth of 10 kilometers in the city of Fayzabad in western Afghanistan.

However, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported only two near-simultaneous earthquakes of magnitudes 4.9 and 5.7 with an epicenter in the Nepalese town of Dipayal Silgadhi in western Nepal.

The tremors could be felt in cities such as New Delhi and Kathmandu, and in some Nepali towns, damage to some houses was reported. Authorities have not reported any deaths at this time.

Nepal and Afghanistan are among the countries most prone to natural disasters and have highly vulnerable populations, mostly poor, in addition to lacking sufficient infrastructure to deal with floods or earthquakes.

According to the Asian Preparedness Partnership (APP), an alliance created to coordinate emergency preparedness among Asian countries, Kathmandu is the national capital at the highest risk of earthquakes among 21 megacities around the world.

On April 25, 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, toppling multi-story buildings in Kathmandu and triggering landslides and avalanches in the mountains. Almost 9,000 people were killed and more than 22,000 injured.

This disaster also left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and caused damages worth almost 6.47 billion euros. More than seven years after the earthquake, reconstruction work has not been completed, slowed in part by the effects of the pandemic.

Afghanistan also suffered one of the biggest earthquake disasters in 1998 in the northern part of the country, when two earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.9 and 6 in February killed around 4,000 people. A few months later, at the end of May, another magnitude 7 earthquake hit the area again, causing around 5,000 deaths.