The Nigeria Geological Survey Agency (NGSA), Sunday, debunked report of alleged earthquake tremor of 3.8 magnitude in Gwagwalada and Abaji, Federal Capital Territory satellite towns, FCT, Abuja, as allegedly captured by an OAU, IleIfe, Osun State Earthquake Monitoring Station on 10 January 2020.
This was confirmed by a deputy director of the Department of Geophysics, NGSA, Abah Usman, while the suspected earthquake occurred during a visit to the cities.
Usman said if there had been such ground shaking in that part of Abuja, the people would have been thrown into chaos and pandemonium, and the agency would definitely have alerted residents seriously.
“For you to effectively record earth quake, it’s not something that you will obtain from one single equipment, and each equipment can record vibration, so for you to get the place where the tremor occurred, you have to use at least minimum of three equipment.
“Now, if there is a problem in configuration, you can pick so many things beneath the earth, but there are those we now classify as tremors. If there is configuration problem, you may think an event is one that is not. Secondly, you can force an event to happen for whatever reason.
“We are now faulting it saying its manner of information dissemination did not follow the right channels. They should have confirmed and compared. Apart from NGSA, there are agencies like NASRDA that have metres and none of them has picked it and earth tremor is not something that can be hidden.
“What struck me the most was for an earth tremor of 3.8 magnitude to have taken place. If it happened it Abaji, that impact would have alerted someone in Jere, but nobody is aware of that impact and the distance is not much.” He said.
