An earthquake has rippled through a small town in the heart of one of Australia’s most well known wine regions.
Residents of the small Barossa Valley towns of Tanunda and Nuriootpa were woken just after 2am on Friday morning to the sound of rumbling from deep within the earth.
Geoscience Australia reported the incident as a 2.8 magnitude earthquake which was generated from a depth of about 10km beneath the surface.
A Nuriootpa resident named Mark told the ABC he felt a “powerful” tremor in the early hours of the morning.
“At first I thought it was thunder. It woke me up straight away, and my little cat who sleeps on the end of our bed, she was up for a while. I reckon it was about three seconds, maybe more,” he said.
Earthquakes lower than 3.5 magnitude “seldom cause damage” according to Geoscience Australia, and no earthquake below a magnitude of 5.4 has ever caused fatalities.