A magnitude 2.9 earthquake has rocked the town of Batlow in NSW\u2019s Snowy Mountains region, with locals reporting hearing a \u201cloud boom\u201d at the time.<\/p>\n
The small earthquake struck about 1pm on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Dozens made reports of tremors to Geoscience Australia \u2013 the government agency responsible for monitoring earthquakes.<\/p>\n
The epicentre of the quake was recorded close to the nearby town of Tumut and measured at magnitude 2.9.<\/p>\n
A second earthquake, with a magnitude of 3, also hit Broken Hill on Sunday night.<\/p>\n
Geoscience Australia confirmed it had received 34 reports from members of the public who had experienced tremors from the seismic event.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Bathgate, a senior seismologist at Geoscience Australia said there had been a number of similar sized earthquakes in the area over the past few years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is an area that has a history of some small earthquakes of this size,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a short movement along the fault, which presents as one short and sharp jolt and a bang, depending on the atmospheric conditions that reverberate off low cloud and appear louder.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause they are so short in duration, it just presents as one loud bang and there\u2019s no ongoing shaking or rumbling, as you get with larger earthquakes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Data from the agency shows that NSW has experienced 62 earthquakes in the past year and 777 over the last decade.<\/p>\n
Water bosses moved swiftly to dampen fears over weather local infrastructure \u2013 including the Blowering Dam \u2013 could be put in danger by the earthquake.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose dams are designed to withstand seismic activity well in excess of what was experience at Tumat and at the site of Blowering,\u201d WaterNSW spokesman Tony Webber told ABC.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that this particular earthquake was well below the threshold to trigger an immediate inspection of the dam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A magnitude 2.9 earthquake has rocked the town of Batlow in NSW\u2019s Snowy Mountains region, with locals reporting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,359532,9989,75,359533,187436,2733,128,25210,670,59221],"class_list":["post-748109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-batlow","tag-earthquake","tag-environment","tag-magnitude","tag-newswire-news","tag-nsw","tag-science","tag-snowy-mountains","tag-sydney","tag-tumut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}