September 23, 2021: -On Wednesday, a magnitude of 6.0 earthquake struck near Melbourne, Geoscience Australia said, one of the country’s most significant quakes on record, causing damage to buildings in the country’s second-largest city and sending tremors throughout neighboring states.

The quake’s epicenter was near the rural town of Mansfield in the Victoria state, about 200 km northeast of Melbourne, and was at a depth of 10 km. An aftershock was rated 4.0.

Images and video footage on social media showed rubble blocking one of Melbourne’s main streets. At the same time, people in northern parts of the city said they had lost power on social media, and others said they were evacuated from buildings.

The quake was felt as far away as the city of Adelaide, 800 km to the west, such as South Australia, and Sydney, 900 km to the north in New South Wales state, although there were no reports of damage outside Melbourne and no reports of injuries.

Over half of Australia’s 25 million population lives in the southeast, from Adelaide to Melbourne to Sydney.

“We have had zero reports of serious injuries, or worse, and that is excellent news, and we hope that good news will keep coming,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Washington.

“It can be an alarming event, an earthquake of this nature. They are infrequent events in Australia, and as a result, I want to ensure people would have been quite distressed and disturbed.”

According to Geoscience Australia, quakes are unusual in Australia’s populated east due to their position in the middle of the Indo-Australian Tectonic Plate. The earthquake on Wednesday measured higher than the deadliest tremor of the country, a 5.6 in Newcastle in 1989, which resulted in 13 deaths.

The mayor of Mansfield, Mark Holcombe, said he was in his home office on his farm when the quake struck and ran outside for safety.

“I have been in earthquakes overseas before, and it seemed to go on longer than I have experienced before,” Holcombe told the ABC. “The other thing that surprised me was how noisy it was, and it, and it was a real rumbling like a big truck going past,” he added.

He knows of no severe damage near the quake epicenter, although some residents reported problems with telecommunications.

No tsunami threat was made to the Australian mainland, islands, or territories, the country’s Bureau of Meteorology said.

The quake presented a potential disruption for anti-lockdown protests expected on Wednesday in Melbourne, which would be the third day of unrest that has reached the surging levels of violence and police response.