6.2 quake, aftershock hit Wellington, central New Zealand, some buildings evacuated

Photo from twitter.com user @felixmarwick, showing a railway station

 in Wellington being cleared.

Two strong earthquakes hit the new Zealand capital, Wellington, with hundreds of commuters reportedly stranded and homes damaged.

One quake of 6.5 magnitude hit the South Island town of Seddon at 02:31 GMT, and an aftershock of 5.7 was registered soon afterward, the BBC reported.  

Chris Birks, the general manager of the Hotel d’Urville in Blenheim, near the quake’s epicenter, told Reuters: "The building just shook and it went on and on and on. There's a lot of police out here and fire sirens going off. It's pretty frightening." 

Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown said life was "business as usual" in the capital and people should not be put off coming into the central business district on Saturday. 

Earlier an earthquake 6.8 on the Richter scale struck the northern tip of New Zealand's South Island on Friday. 

The depth of the quake was about 10 km, US Geological Survey reported.  Bill Fry of GNS Science, a New Zealand-based research institute, told Reuters the quake and aftershocks were “very, very frightening and concerning for people, but it's been ‘keep calm and carry on,’"adding that despite Wellington sustaining much heavier damage, the epicenter was actually 75 kilometers south of the capital.

There have been reports of boulders coming down on highways and cellular networks down in Wellington. 

There were also widespread power outages across the north of the South Island. 

Train services have been suspended as authorities check the tracks.

No major damage or casualties have been reported, but the tremors were felt everywhere, as evident in this footage from a CCTV camera inside a Wellington store. 

There was no specific threat of a widespread tsunami, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. 

A car drives past a crack in a road after an earthquake on the outskirts of the town of Seddon in the Marlborough region, on New Zealand's South Island August 16, 2013.(Reuters / Anthony Phelps)

The damaged roof of a church is pictured after an earthquake in the town of Seddon in the Marlborough region, on New Zealand's South Island August 16, 2013.(Reuters / Anthony Phelps)

Central New Zealand has in recent weeks experienced a number of earthquakes of varying strength, including a 6.5 magnitude quake approximately 40 kilometers from the current epicenter on July 21.

Several earlier quakes, measuring 5.3-5.8 on the Richter scale, were followed by dozens of aftershocks of lesser magnitude. 

According to the US Geological Survey, the quakes and aftershocks have delineated shallow upper plate structures northeast and southwest of New Zealand, also causing some seismic activity on the north coast of New Zealand’s South Island.