Published on May 07, 2005

Residents in two separate areas felt tremors on Thursday and saw road surfaces distorted.

“A road leading to my village seemed to bend, and some parts of it cracked,” Thawat Petchawira, an official working for a local disaster-prevention-and-mitigation office, said yesterday.

He said the damage to the road, in Phu Phiang subdistrict, was a 30-centimetre-wide, five-metre-long crack. The incident occurred on Thursday evening.

Thawat said he had later received a report that a similar incident had happened in Wiang Sa district.

“I felt my house shaking, so I ran for my life. While running away I heard something that sounded like an explosion. When I turned round to look I saw that the road had twisted,” said Saneh Thakham, a 52-year-old local resident.

He said that when a passing car hit a raised part of the damaged road a large piece had broken off.

“I talked to neighbours, and all of them agreed that it felt something like an earthquake,” Saneh said.

Pol Corporal Somdej Yanoi said part of the road had been bent upward by up to 25cm and a crack was over two metres long. He said the road, built 16 years ago, was made of bamboo.

Neither incident caused damage to houses or injured anyone.

Thawat said he had reported the incidents to the Mineral Resources Department for help in determining the cause of the tremors. In the past few months similar incidents have been reported in Udon Thani and Uttaradit.

Meanwhile the provincial meteorological office said that no earthquake activity had been detected in Nan on Thursday.

Adichat Surinkum, director of the Mineral Resources Department’s Geotechnics Division, yesterday explained that worn-out roads could twist after being in service for a long time and heat could enlarge soil mass under the road to a level where it pushed up some parts of road surface.

“But we are going to inspect the scenes in Nan to determine the exact causes,” he said.

Adichat advised people not to panic about such incidents, saying similar things had happened for a long time but no one had paid them any attention before the tsunami. “The tsunami seems to have made people more vigilant,” he said.

Santichai Jarupha, Budsarakham Sinlapalavan

The Nation

Nan

Post your comment to this story here