Quakes give no rest to India’s Gujarat

Two tremors measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale have struck the west Indian state of Gujarat, three weeks after an earthquake killed at least 30,000 people in the same region. There were no immediate reports of deaths or injuries in the tremors, recorded a little more than six hours apart but residents in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's main city, and the town of Bhuj ran from their homes and temporary shelters in panic. Seismologists said aftershocks were expected to continue for the next few months. But they did not expect Gujarat to follow the El Salvador pattern where a quake measuring 6.6 hit last week, exactly a month after a 7.6 quake. More than 1,000 people were killed. "The tectonic behaviour of the fault running below El Salvador cannot be related to the intraplate fault in (Gujarat's) Kutch region," B.K. Rastogi, deputy director of the National Geophysical Research Institute at Hyderabad, told Reuters.