Nigerian Govt allays fear over Abuja tremor

The Federal Government, through the Nigerian Geological Survey Agency, NGSA, has allayed the fears in Abuja residents over the recent tremor experience in Mpape, a suburb of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT.

This is contained in a statement by the Director-General of the Agency, Prof Olusegun Ige, on Wednesday in Abuja.

Ige said the NGSA is monitoring the tremors, adding that they found the tremors to be low and did not pose any threat to the environment.

According to him, the Monitoring Station at Katampe has been capturing several significant ground motions with high moment magnitudes in the past five days, beginning from September 13, 2024, till date.

He added that only one mild event was recorded on September 13th, stressing that six of the events were captured on the 14th of September, while over 21 events were captured on the 15th with higher intensities and more than twenty events were recorded on the September 16.

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The statement read, “The intensity and frequency of the tremor appear to increase from the 13th to 16th September. There are a few weak events recorded today, 17th September.

“Preliminary analysis of the waveforms showed that the sources of the ground motions are less than 5 km away from the monitoring station.

“The NGSA team also visited the affected areas for on-the-spot assessments of the events. From the accounts of the residents of the affected areas, the observations by the NGSA team, and findings from earlier interpretations of the airborne geophysical data over the area and adjoining areas, the following conclusions were made: The tremors are a result of accumulated stress along the identified faults and released seismic energy, which may have travelled through associated fractures to areas where the tremors were felt around the FCT.

“There are multiple epicentres associated with the recent tremor. Most of the epicentres are located northeast of the NGSA-5 Seismic Station around the Mpape axis, while a few are located southwest of the Station around the Katampe axis.”