Kalgoorlie locals wake to houses shaking as 3.4 magnitude earthquake rocks regional town

Kalgoorlie locals were woken Friday morning to an earthquake with a magnitude of 3.4 and depth of 5km.

Residents of the Goldfields city reported their entire homes were shaken by the natural event, which according to the Geoscience Australia website occurred at 5.34am.

“Shook my whole house and woke me up,” one local reported on Facebook, while another said not only did it shake “absolutely everything”, it caused paintings to fall off the walls.

“Holy sh** the whole house just shook sideways,” another said.

The quake site was slightly north-west of the city centre, but appeared to have been felt by people right across its suburbs.

“It felt like it was right under our house in Lamington,” one person reported.

Someone else claimed the shaking caused their “freaking TV” to turn on by itself.

One person’s entire house shifted significantly, they wrote.

“It moved our house about a metre, that was the strongest one I’ve felt yet in the past few years,” the resident claimed on Facebook.

“I thought the whole roof was going to fall,” another said.

About 350 people reported feeling the earthquake, with people from Boulder also saying they felt it.

“Oh that was scary,” one wrote.

It was so significant that someone thought their “whole roof was going to fall”.

“It was a bloody good wake up shake! Haven’t had a good one like that in a while! Everything shook in this house,” someone else said.

“That was a big bang,” another reported and someone else said, “My windows vibrated and bed too”.

While the event was felt broadly, it was far from the biggest earthquake in Kalgoorlie.

There was a 5.2 magnitude quake in 2010 that caused major damage to historic buildings and resulted in two people being rushed to hospital.

While locals have become somewhat accustomed to movement in the ground due to routine mining blasts, earthquakes aren’t uncommon for the area either.

The regional town gets a number of earthquakes each year but typically with a magnitude under four, which is significant enough to feel but won’t usually cause structural damage.

Magnitude quakes between one and two happen every few weeks, but the last more significant one felt across town was January 12 when a 2.7 magnitude quake hit.

The jolt was tiny in comparison to Australia’s biggest recorded earthquake of 6.5 magnitude on October 1968 in Meckering, 130km east of Perth.