A powerful earthquake struck the eastern Caribbean on Thursday, causing minor injuries on the island of Martinique and reportedly producing shaking as far away as Venezuela. The earthquake which struck at 2 p.m. EST, with a magnitude of 7.4, was centered 26 miles southeast of Roseau, the capital of Dominica, where the shaking lasted for about 20 seconds. In Martinique, a government official said police and firefighters were responding to hundreds of calls for help, the Associated Press reported. He said some people sustained minor injuries, but no major casualties have been reported. Reports from the island suggested infrastructure damage but few serious injuries. The quake struck at a depth of 90 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Web site. “I wouldn't expect major damage because the quake has some depth,” Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, told AP. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said the quake was too deep to generate a destructive tsunami. Trembles from the quakes triggered a series of false quake alarms in California, with computers picking up energy coming out of the Caribbean and erroneously treating it as local seismic activity. The fake quakes began registering nine minutes after the Caribbean quake, USGS scientists said. In September, a similar incident occurred when a massive earthquake struck off the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean and triggered six false reports of quakes in California.
