Tangshan shrugs as magnitude 4.5 quake hits city

No casualties or property damage were caused by a 4.5 magnitude earthquake that hit Tangshan, Hebei province, on Thursday morning, the authorities said.

The tremor was also felt in neighboring cities, including Beijing and Tianjin.

The epicenter of the earthquake, which occurred at 8:02 am, was at a depth of 10 kilometers in the town of Liushuquan in Tangshan's Fengnan district, the Hebei Earthquake Agency said.

After the earthquake, railway authorities suspended trains passing through Tangshan to carry out a thorough examination of railway facilities in affected areas, China Railway Beijing Group said.

The epicenter was about 150 km southeast of Beijing and around 15 km north of the Bohai Sea. The shaking at the epicenter lasted about 30 seconds, the earthquake agency said.

The quake was felt strongly near the epicenter, and obvious or slight shocks were also felt in other parts of Tangshan, the Hebei cities of Langfang, Zhangjiakou, Qinhuangdao and Cangzhou, and Beijing and Tianjin, it added.

Li Lijia, who lives in Fengnan, said she felt her bed shake for about four seconds and saw the ceiling lamp move for a while.

Meng Derui, a 55-year-old resident of Tangshan's Luannan county, said he was not frightened by the earthquake because he had experienced a big earthquake when he was a child and has lived through many slight ones.

After the earthquake, experts, staff from emergency response departments and firefighters went to Liushuquan to evaluate the situation and check if there were any casualties or damage to houses and facilities.

Tangshan was destroyed by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 1976 that killed more than 240,000 residents and injured over 160,000.

The city has been hit by 20 earthquakes above magnitude 3 since 2010, with seven of them over magnitude 4, Li Yongqing, head of the Earthquake Forecasting Research Center at Hebei Earthquake Agency, said.

"This quake is within normal range, considering the city's geological conditions and history of quakes," he said.

Li said both Zhangjiakou and Tangshan are located in seismic zones. Huai'an county in Zhangjiakou was hit by a 3.4 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday that was followed by four aftershocks.

The conditions of buildings in northern China are such that only earthquakes near magnitude 5 or above might have destructive results, Li said.

Sun Shihong, a researcher at the China Earthquake Networks Center, told chinanews.com the cause of the latest quake was yet to be determined, but he did not think it was an aftershock of the 1976 quake.