Garfield D’Souza (26) was busy inside a sixth floor Andheri office, minutes past 3 pm, when he noticed an unoccupied chair shake. Quickly, the Cactus Communications office and buildings near Fame Adlabs spilled people out on the road.Inside the POTA court at Churchgate, special judge A.P. Bhangale was hearing the case of the mysterious disappearance of Khwaja Yunus—a bomb blast accused—when he made a spontaneous observation. ‘‘My table is vibrating.’’For tense seconds around 3.14 pm, Mumbai braced in near panic and the disaster management machinery swung into high-alert. A moderate earthquake, over 200 km away at Koyna, led to offices in Nariman Point being temporarily evacuated and rattled windows and beds in Navi Mumbai’s highrises.But Monday’s earthquake was not dangerous for Mumbai, which lies in the moderately safer seismic zone three. ‘‘The epicentre is too far away to impact Mumbai,’’ says Alok Goyal, an earthquake engineering specialist at IIT. Goyal adds: ‘‘The probability of a magnitude 5 earthquake occurring in Mumbai’s immediate vicinity is once in 40-50 years.’’But when the ground shook, it rattled thousands from Nariman Point to Bandra and Malad. ‘‘My colleague started screaming,’’ said Sharad Shirke (24), staff at the ICICI Wadala branch. ‘‘People started calling families to check if they had felt tremors.’’Quake felt in Pune, no damage to Koyna damPune: Pune recorded a quake of magnitude 4 in on the modified Mercalli Scale but no damage was reported to the Koyna dam. ‘‘The epicentre was recorded at latitude 17.2 North and longitude 73.7 East in Koyna region with a magnitude of 5.1,’’ Seismological Observatory director P.N. Mohanan said. S.G. Joshi, executive engineer, Koyna Dam Maintenance Division, said no damage was detected to the dam. Work is on to reinforce the spillway of the dam. —ENS
