ANKARA - An earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale rattled an eastern Turkish town overnight, sparking panic among residents and damaging buildings, officials said Thursday.
The quake, the third powerful tremor to hit the town of Karliova in Bingol province this month, occurred at 11:44 pm (2144 GMT) and was followed by an aftershock that registered 4.7 on the Richter scale, the Istanbul-based Kandilli observatory said.
Karliova prefect Erkan Capar told Anatolia news agency there were no reports of people injured, but added that 20 residents had been treated in hospital for shock.
The prefect was earlier quoted as saying that six people were injured as they rushed out from their homes in panic.
Many people whose homes were damaged in the two previous tremors had already been spending the nights in tents, Capar said.
Television footage showed residents sitting in the streets, wrapped in blankets.
The prefect said that several buildings sustained serious damage, but no casualties ocurred because they had already been emptied as a precaution following two quakes that hit Karliova with magnitutes of 5.9 and 5.7 on the Richter scale on March 14 and March 12 respectively.
Some 30 people were injured in the two tremors.
In 2003, a quake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale left 176 people dead in Bingol province, almost half of them children asleep at their boarding school when the tremor struck.
Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, which is crossed by several seismological fault lines. Some 20,000 people perished in two massive tremors in heavily industrialized northwestern Turkey in August and November 1999.
03/24/2005 10:19 GMT