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Talk:1990 Bishop's Castle earthquake

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Finding reliable contemporary sources on the Internet for a regionally centred event that happened as far back as 1990, ie years before the Internet was in even minority use by the general public, is extremely difficult if not impossible.

Source 1, the report of the Earthquake Engineering Research Unit, is the only truly contemporary source I have been able to find so far on the Internet. It confirms many of my own personal eyewitness memories on which this article was first founded and reminds me of one or two others such as the damage to the churches, but does not cover all of what I witnessed and remember. This is because it is a summary report by a third-party international body located abroad from the UK, and which therefore in itself relied wholly on news reporting and second-hand tip-offs from geological insiders based in the UK. So it is accurate as far as it goes, but misses some eyewitness details out.

The only way to improve on this from contemporary published sources would be to seek out archives of the local papers the Shropshire Star and the Shrewsbury Chronicle from the time and use their material to flesh out this shell. I am not living in Shropshire any more and cannot do this, nor do I know if the papers in question keep a complete archive of their old numbers. Perhaps a resident of Shrewsbury or the surrounding area could do this.

Until then, personal eyewitness memories by people who were there at the scene of the worst damage are the only solution for providing that detail. These people, myself included, may not have ever seen fit to write these memories down at any other website, but that does not invalidate them or render them inaccurate.

For the record, I was myself in an upstairs room at 21, Bishop Street, at the crossroads with Clifford Street in the Cherry Orchard area of Shrewsbury at the time of the quake, resting after a bicycle ride, yet wide awake, and vividly remember every detail of the sound and the movement of the wall as described. I was genuinely anxious that the whole wall might collapse into the front garden and bring down at least part of the roof with it, because the wall was shifting at least half a foot from side to side in rapid repetitive movements. When it died down I went right outside and found that almost everyone was out in the street looking shocked but relieved, and that at least two chimneys just a few houses down Bishop Street on the other side had fallen completely into their small front gardens. I wandered to the end of Clifford Street and looked at the adjacent streets that intersect with it too, and found several other examples of collapsed chimneys just in that one little local area of the town. And that was just from street-level, without seeing possibly others in people's hidden-from-view back gardens. I returned to switch on the radio and heard the epicentre being successively mooted as being in Nottingham, then somewhere in the east of mid-Wales, and then finally in Shropshire, in successive reports over the next few hours. I also remember that it was reported that there was less structural damage in the immediate vicinity of the epicentre than there was further north in and around Shrewsbury, which seems to be borne out by Source 1; and though I don't know the technical seismological reasons for this, there were rumours locally that some of the worst-affected parts of Shrewsbury lay on a weaker underlying rock formation which would tend to amplify the seismic waves. Philip Graves (talk) 23:18, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry but wikipedia is not a place for personal, unsourced reminiscence. If the earthquake is truly notable - I was in Knighton and barely noticed it - then the internet will be full of references. Have you googled? A cursory check reveals 8,140 hits for "bishops castle" + "earthquake". For more on notability see WP:N. For more on correct citations see WP:CITE --MJB (talk) 23:25, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was living in High Wycombe, (just west of London) at the time of this quake and I remember the glass doors in a cupboard at work rattling etc because of it, the only time until last night (the Market Rasen quake of 2008 - and I'm now living in West Yorkshire so far nearer this one and which woke me up momentarily,I thought it was the wind - is the only other time when I've felt anything from an earthquake) so if the other quakes mentioned here are worthy of inclusion I think from how wide the Bishops Castle one was felt it definitely deserves a wikipedia entry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.254.173.35 (talk) 08:29, 27 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]


You may find this example helpful - 2007 Kent earthquake. --MJB (talk) 23:44, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I saw that article earlier, and that's precisely the source of my point:

Notability is relative and I created this article after finding that articles were already in existence for the 1984 quake and also the more recent Dudley and Kent quakes, the latter two of which both were of smaller magnitude on the Richter scale, although the Kent one caused at least as much damage as the Bishop's Castle one - it was illogical in the circumstances to omit this one. There are many more sources on the Internet about the lower-magnitude Dudley and Kent earthquakes precisely because they occurred when the Internet (and in the Kent earthquake case also wikipedia) was in widespread active use. I wanted to put this situation right for the sake of coherence within the UK earthquake category.

Agreed that personal reminiscences are not ideal as sources for wikipedia, but at the same time there is a disparity in the availability of sources according to the status of the Internet at the time of the event, and events of equal notability can be and are represented unequally on the Internet as a result. If there had been the Internet in 1990, then most assuredly there would be archived articles from BBC News, the Guardian, the Shropshire Star, and similar publishers readily available, confirming every detail of my personal reminiscences, though most of the more important ones have been covered by Source One already, and I'll accept that some of those that haven't could be deleted without detriment to the core record of the event served by the wikipedia article if they cannot be independently validated elsewhere, but I would suggest it would be wise to allow other contributors who were present at the scenes worst affected plenty of time to find and review the article and suggest amendments and sources before rushing to delete statements that so far have not been independently sourced.

The fact that you didn't feel the earthquake in Knighton (which is if I recall correctly from hiking between Clun and Knighton in my youth just beyond the extreme south-west border of the county, ie in practically the opposite direction from the epicentre relative to those areas worst affected, and also separated by at least some hills from it, which I imagine might have somewhat dampened the waves) does not render the experiences of people who were of a responsible age and in Shrewsbury that afternoon any the less reliable. If you can find a majority of residents of Shrewsbury at the time of the event who dispute my records, that would be a reason to cast my memories into doubt. But as already said, the most important facts have already been confirmed by Source One. Philip Graves (talk) 23:50, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Knighton is about 10 miles away! My mother went to Bishops Castle school. All irrelevant as are personal reminiscence. 30 mins work following up the google references and a bit of tidying up would transform an OK article into a very good one. I am trying to help and assume that you are new to wikipedia. It is not for personal, first-hand recollection. It is for referenced, independently sourced, encyclopaedic facts.

I am not doubting your memory and please do not take any comments personally. --MJB (talk) 23:57, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Max, you've found some excellent sources - especially the Google books source with a spectrograph of magnitude against time (though it's poorly labelled) on page 5 of the book preview. I'm not entirely convinced by your interpretation of the source about the Dudley earth tremor (magnitude 4.8) in application to the Bishop's Castle one, since the source states that experts have estimated that 1% of buildings should have been damaged in the Dudley earthquake, but does not state that this was the limit to the extent of damage in the Bishop's Castle earthquake - it merely states that the experts modelled their calculations for the Dudley quake on what happened in the Bishop's Castle quake, which might well mean that they downwardly adjusted their expectations because of the lower intensity of the Dudley quake compared with the Bishop's Castle one, not forgetting that the Richter scale is logarithmic and that a quake of magnitude 5.8 would be ten times as intense as one of 4.8, which means that one of 5.1 would be of 2-3 times the intensity of one of 4.8. Thus it might be that for instance one in thirty to one in fifty buildings suffered notable structural damage in the worst affected areas in 1990, and that would certainly tie much more closely with my direct observations at the time of chimney falls in Shrewsbury than the figure for Dudley of one in a hundred. But thanks all the same for helping to improve the article and challenging me to do the same. Philip Graves (talk) 19:13, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If the Dudley and Kent earthquakes are notable enough to be on Wikipedia, then this one certainly is, taking into consideration the amount of times an earthquake of this magnitude (5.0+) occurs in the UK (around 5 times a century). RapidR (talk) 22:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This article has just been rated by someone as 'Start-class', yet it is as thoroughly researched as was possible using sources on the Internet and an external enquiry to the British Geological Society. It is also thoroughly referenced. Having read the assessment scale criteria, I wholeheartedly dispute the rating. Philip Graves (talk) 10:40, 8 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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