Organist is killed in Croatia quake

Among the casualties of the earthquake that struck the Croatian region of Banovina yesterday was the church organist of Žažina, a man in his sixties called Stanko Zec.

He was in a group of people cleaning debris in the parish church after an earthquake the day before when they were hit by aftershocks.

Here’s what an aftershock looks like.

Tim Page writes from Croatia: ‘This is the largest earthquake to occur in Croatia since the advent of modern seismic instrumentation. It was preceded by two sizeable foreshocks, a magnitude 4.7 and a magnitude 5.2 on December 28. About one in twenty earthquakes have foreshocks. An earthquake of similar size to the recent M6.4 occurred in 1880 near Zagreb and there have been three magnitude 6 and larger earthquakes within 200 km of the December 29, 2020 earthquake since 1900.’