Magnitude 5 earthquake hits Egypt, no damage reported

A magnitude 5 earthquake was felt on Monday in the Red Sea off the Egyptian coast in the Gulf of Aqaba, according to the American Institute of Geophysics (USGS).

While magnitude 5 earthquakes can cause some structural damage to buildings, no losses or casualties have been reported. Aftershocks could occur in the following days.

The earthquake, whose epicenter was at a depth of 10 km, struck at around 0445hrs local time, 25 km northeast of Dahab located in the Sinai Peninsula, according to the USGS website.

Sizzling heat, an earthquake and fires in Cairo and it's not even 10 am here. #Egypt

— Tamer El-Ghobashy (@TamerELG) May 16, 2016

The president of the Egypt Institute of Astrological and Geophysics Studies, Dr. Hatem Ouda said that the epicenter of the light tremor is the same as the magnitude 7.3 earthquake which devastated Egypt in 1995 and was felt then in Lebanon, Syria and Cyprus.

On October 12, 1992, 552 people were killed in Cairo and its region and hundreds of homes destroyed by a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.