'It certainly woke me up': South Taranaki earthquake felt widely

People in Waverley were woken by the large quake but no damage has been reported. Photo / Bevan Conley

The magnitude 5.8 earthquake that struck Stratford late on Wednesday night was felt strongly in Waverley, but no damage has been reported there or in Whanganui.

The quake hit at 11.49pm on Wednesday, 25km east of Stratford and at a depth of 187km.

A South Taranaki District Council spokesperson said there had not yet been any reports of damage.

The Whanganui District Council also said there had been no reports of damage.

GAS Waverley owner Davendra Singh said the rumble woke him up.

"We certainly felt it. It certainly woke me up."

Singh said he didn't have to go to check his store because nothing had fallen in his house.

Customers this morning had been talking about the quake when visiting.

The manager at the Main Street Café in Waverley said she did not notice any major damage in the town that morning.

Like Singh, she saw no need to go to check the café because nothing had fallen off shelves at her home.

It was the major point of conversation among customers.

Godderidges Pharmacy retail clerk Merissa Dalton said she was also woken by the quake.

"I heard the rumble, I thought it was a big truck then the rumbling started.

"It wasn't too terrible for us."

She said her first thought was she hoped her swimming pool at her recently-purchased house was not damaged.

The quake was felt as far away as Christchurch, Hawke's Bay and Wellington.

"A large number of felt reports came from the east and south of the North island, with only a few in the central plateau and further north," GNS duty seismologists Elizabeth Abbott and John Ristau said.

The spread of the quake being felt around the country was because of its depth, the pair wrote on the GNS website in regards to the Stratford earthquake.

"Typically, deep earthquakes occur in the Pacific Plate, which is subducting or diving under the North Island," the pair wrote in a report on the GNS website.

They said the Pacific Plate is made up of rigid and molten rock and it is the former that is better at transmitting earthquake waves.

"In fact, molten rock 'dampens' the energy from [a] deeper earthquake and helps to explain why the shaking is felt less near the epicentre when earthquakes occur in that area.

"When an earthquake happens in or near this slab of subducting plate, most of the quake's energy travels up and along the slab to the surface - closer to the East and South of the North Island – resulting in the shaking from the earthquake being felt more widely across those areas."

GNS classified the shaking from the quake as "light" despite many people reporting it as being a lot stronger than that.

"The predicted shaking intensity for an earthquake on the GeoNet website is estimated from the shaking recorded by seismic instruments, earthquake magnitude, depth, and proximity to population centres," Abbott and Ristau said.

"This means for a deeper earthquake such as this one where shaking is not felt as closely to the epicentre, this estimation may not reflect everyone's experience."