Biggest Quake in 24 Years Shakes and Stirs Uk

It was like a bomb, a plane crash or even a giant lizard from a Hollywood blockbuster on the rampage, according to startled residents at the epicentre of Britain's worst earthquake for 24 years.

A carved stone cross which tumbled from the roof of Market Rasen's medieval church may have been the only local casualty, but everyone in the Lincolnshire town had stories of judders, roars and terrifyingly visible wobbles in their houses' old stone walls overnight.

"It was like the most awful fairground ride you can imagine," said Adrian Campbell, 56, a DVD and video producer who initially thought that his tumble dryer had somehow come on at 1am. "It just got worse and worse. We went to see a film last week about a giant lizard loose in New York, and I honestly started to wonder if something like that had come for us."

The quake rippled across Market Rasen for at least 10 seconds, according to sixth formers Thea Garratt and Kirstie Silson, both 16, who recently went on the Natural History Museum's earthquake simulator on a school visit to London.

"It was exactly like that - you felt the ground was giving way," said Kirstie, whose home has only just recovered from summer flood damage. "We'd been out celebrating A-level coursework results with a curry and we woke up and were like: 'Whoa! What's happening?' You know that noise radiators sometimes make? Well, ours was making it, but it was shaking and dust was flying off it as well."

Lincolnshire fire service took 200 calls, and emergency switchboards lit up as far away as London and Scotland, as the shock cannoned across old geological faults underlying much of the country. The only serious injury was in Wombwell, South Yorkshire, where 19-year-old student David Bates suffered a fractured pelvis after a chimney crashed through the roof into his bedroom where he was watching TV. "The house is a bomb site now, to be honest. A real mess," said his father Paul Davies, who watched as a salvage crew removed a stone chimney block held on the ruined stack only by a taut TV aerial wire. "We obviously can't live there as it is."

Soft land bordering the river Trent in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire took much of the brunt of the tremor, which measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and was the country's worst since 1984 when a 5.4 shock hit the Lleyn peninsula in north Wales and was felt across England. The Red Cross mobilized volunteers in Gainsborough to help 14 people with damaged homes and cars, including an elderly lady whose ceilings collapsed, filling her ground floor rooms with rubble.

Just down the road, teaching assistant Shona Forsyth and her toddler woke to crashes as chimneys from their street of 1920s terrace houses toppled over. She said: "All I could hear was this rumbling and I looked out of the window and saw my chimney pots on the road. At least we've have been told we are covered."

Widespread minor damage in Grimsby and Cleethorpes, 20 miles to the north of the epicenter, is expected to bring the national insurance bill to over £10m. Small claims will be made as far apart as Leeds, where a five-second ripple brought pictures down and damaged garden walls, and Chester, where 29-year-old public relations officer Mark Shone's water glass "rattled right across the bedside table. My partner is down in London at the moment staying in Canary Wharf and he said he thought a bomb had gone off, too."

In Derbyshire, where the East Midlands plain encounters the Pennines, Alaister Wheeldon and his laptop were thrown out of an armchair by the tremor, with such force that the computer plug was torn from its socket. Neighbors in Ilkeston described crockery tumbling out of cupboards and a "train-like rumbling, followed by spooky silence".

The Environment Agency said that any quake measuring more than five on the Richter scale could be expected to cause structural damage.

Lincolnshire's finest building, the cathedral on Steep Hill in Lincoln which can be seen from miles across the flatlands around the city, is the result of an earthquake which wrecked its Norman predecessor in 1195. Yesterday's epicenter was close to the latitude of the largest earthquake recorded in the UK, a 6.1 Richter scale tremor below the North Sea's Dogger Bank, which caused giant waves on the East Anglian coast in 1931.