Earthquake hits China, trembles felt in Bangkok

Suddenly deciding it’s time for a cigarette break at 2pm today, I headed out on my balcony at work to find hundreds of people below that were evacuating out of one of the tallest buildings in Thailand, The Empire Building. The alarms were going off and more and more people were spreading across the surrounding area. At first I thought it was a fire alarm drill, which every building must do at least once a year here, but I asked my team mate to go and ask someone downstairs what was happening anyway out of curiosity. When he returned he said that Bangkok had just had a small earth quake and that everyone in the tall buildings surrounding us had felt it.

I was gob smacked as we didn’t feel a thing but I decided the safe option would be to vacate our office as well. We stood outside the office with thousands of others for around an hour, before deciding it was safe return.

Chatting to one guy who was working on a high rise apartment building site, he said that everyone felt it and ran for their lives.

After coming back and checking Google News as to what happened, I learnt that a powerful earthquake measuring 7.8 hit china this afternoon and the aftermath trembles had traveled down to the capitol of Vietnam (Hanoi), and the capitol of Thailand, Bangkok.