Exactly 25 years ago Roswinkel shook to its foundations. The earthquake with a magnitude of 3.4 on the Richter scale was the strongest ever in Drenthe. Villager Willem Bijl remembers it well: “The ground suddenly shook. We had never experienced that before.”
It was one of the first earthquakes in the Northern Netherlands. The heaviest anyway. Up to the present day. On February 19, 1997, at about eleven o’clock in the evening, the village shook briefly and violently. The epicenter was near the church in Roswinkel and the quake reached Emmer-Compascuum, Nieuw-Weerdinge, Nieuw-Dordrecht and Ter Apel. Until then, thirteen earthquakes had been reported since 1992, but not as severe as this one.
‘It vibrated, it shook, it cracked a bit’
“We didn’t really know what happened to us,” says Willem Bijl, who has lived in Roswinkel since 1991. “It was unknown. The villagers were fairly calm about it, that’s how I remember it. It vibrated, it shook and it cracked a bit, but I didn’t think it was sensational,” says Bijl soberly.