MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

“Residents of the town cannot help but feel anxious, as the intensity of the quakes keeps increasing. The nearby mountain of the Truong Son chain explodes ever more loudly every night.

Lu Quang Lai, nearly 70, says he has never witnessed such strange phenomenon in Tra My in the past decades.

‘About 10 months ago, when the new hydroelectricity power plant started to conserve water, the water level in the lake got higher every day. The land here seemed to change. Every night exploding sounds would emanate from the earth, followed by a rumbling sound. Recently the explosions and quakes have become more violent. Glasses and cups fall down like leaves, everything tilts’, Lai speaks in a tremble.

Nguyen Phuoc Danh, a motorbike mechanic, lives in a house 300km from Song Tranh 2 hydroelectricity plant’s dam. His home is the worst affected in the area, suffering from three tremors.

‘Two nights ago, the mountain exploded with a deafening sound. Although I’ve become used to the noise caused by TNT explosives during the dam’s construction, nothing compared to the recent explosion.

‘A few seconds later, the earth shook. The roof and the windows rattled. Things started to fall. The wall creaked, and then cracked. I took my wife and kids out to the street. A chill crept up from my heels to my head just like electricity’, Danh says in disbelief.

Frogs move in colonies

While the tremors await an explanation from scientists, residents continue to witness bizarre phenomenon.

People of Bac Tra My District recall the story of Ho Van Thoi, 54, who brought back a load of frogs and toads caught in Nuoc Vin creek’s headwaters one day before the quake.

Thoi says, ‘That afternoon, while trying to quench my thirst, I saw an army of frogs and toads swimming upstream. There were so many of them that they climbed on top of one another, all I had to do was reach down and pick them up.’

Thoi, along with other villagers, asserts that such an odd event has never happened before in this area. ‘The frogs must have heard the tremors before us humans!’, Thoi postulates.

According to residents, the area around Nuoc Vin creek was originally a hot spring. The water was boiling hot; hot enough to cook a shrimp in just one dip.” Read more.

Toads could be used to forecast earthquakes days before they happen – “Aside from ionosphere disturbances, nature has a number of ways that signify an earthquake’s arrival far earlier than an iPhone can. Animals, for instance, are known to leave their homes and head to safety anywhere from a few seconds to weeks before humans can feel quakes… Rachel Grant from the U.K. Open University and Friedemann Freund from NASA believe they may have figured it all out, thanks to a colony of toads. Grant monitored a toad colony in L’Aquila, Italy for her PhD project, when she noticed the population number dropped from 96 to almost zero at least three days before an earthquake hit. After forming a team with Freund, they studied how and why that event happened. The results … showed that stress in the surrounding rocks released charged particles that contaminated the groundwater. The toads, of course, sought refuge away from their environment which had suddenly become toxic.” Read more.