Port of Figueira da Foz
Port of Figueira da Foz
Loud noise was heard in several parts of the municipality; ground shook. It sounded like distant thunder, on a day without thunder. It wasn’t construction work, it wasn’t a plane.
Early afternoon something mysterious in Figueira da Foz: one heard and felt one loud bang. The origin is uncertain.
At 12:37 this Monday, in the outdoor parking lot of a commercial area in the town of Buarcos, Figueira da Foz, the Lusa agency noted the occurrence of a short ‘dull’ noise – similar to a distant thunder – but clearly audible, immediately followed by a shock wave which lasted about two seconds, fez the ground shakes and the windows shake violently from the supermarket.
The “explosion” was also heard in Lavos, Mallorca or Quiaios, according to . The same newspaper exclude the possibility that this bang originated in the underwater bursts of the works at the port of Figueira da Foz – because it was heard in different parts of the municipality and because no work was planned at that time, at the port.
Source from the Figueira da Foz Municipal Civil Protection Service – which also heard the noise and felt the shock wave – had suggested that it could have been military planes who at that time would be carrying out exercise flights off the coast of Figueira da Foz. “If the sound barrier was broken, it could have created a sound similar to an explosion”.
But later the same service moved away a hypothesis that it was a combat plane passing the sound barrier, after contact to that effect with the Portuguese Air Force (and that there were no reports of a plane having flown over that area).
Also it wasn’t an electrical discharge: clear skies at the time of the occurrence and there was no evidence of electrical discharges in practically the entire continental territory at that time.
The same source indicated that firefighters did not register any emergency calls given what happened.
A source from the port community of Figueira da Foz also emphasized that the port workers there “did not hear or feel anything”, such as the commander of the Port of Figueira da Foz, who was in the Captaincy, on the city’s riverside, on the right bank.
However, on the left bank of the Mondego, in the fishing port area, downstream of the commercial pier, and also at the Navigator dump site, about 10 km as the crow flies to the south, there were several reports of what had happened.
There were also reports in villages in the north and northeast of the municipality of Figueira da Foz (such as Quiaios or Ferreira-a-Nova), Tocha (Cantanhede) and Bunhosa and Arazede (Montemor-o-Velho), among other places.
Contacted by Lusa, the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA) admitted having received several phone calls, particularly from fire brigades, reporting what had happened, clarifying, however, that the continent’s seismological network stations – which in addition to earthquakes, can sometimes identify non-tectonic events – they didn’t record anything.
Civil Protection was also trying to understand what happened. But without success.
