If you've ever been through an earthquake, you'll know they can be pretty frightening. The ground starts to shake, and buildings can fall down. Today's story is about a town that has an earthquake every two days.



NICOLE ELY: Hawker is located in the Flinders Ranges, four hours north of Adelaide. It seems tranquil enough, but this is a town that literally rocks and rolls!

DEBRA SOLLY: You can hear it rumbling in from the west and next thing it's upon you and it's under you and all your walls are shaking and your kitchen table's shaking and the windows and you're all looking at each other sort of like "Oooh?"

JEFF MORGAN: It's like a train coming up the street, you hear the rumble come, and then you feel a bit of a shake and then you hear it going the other way.

NICOLE ELY: On average, Hawker is hit by an earthquake every two days, making it one of the top three sites in Australia for seismic activity.

DEBRA SOLLY: The last one we had which was earlier this year I think. That was very scary because it really shook the whole house, yeah.

NICOLE ELY: Scientists from Primary Industries are constantly monitoring the activity. Readings from this sensor near Hawker are beamed back to the station where they're read on a seismograph.

JOHN TEAGUE: We change the paper every 24 or 25 hours, have to see that the pen keeps writing, and every week we roll the papers up and put them in a tube and send them off to Adelaide.

NICOLE ELY: Dr David Love and his team at Primary Industries study earthquakes across SA. Dr Love is collecting the data to develop a model of quake activity in the State, but he says science is still a long way off being able to predict the big one.

DR DAVID LOVE: It would really be nice to be able to predict earthquakes, but all we can do at the moment is to watch the patterns, keep a close eye on it all and hopefully one day we will be able to get somewhere near prediction.

NICOLE ELY: However, he says people in Hawker shouldn't start wearing hard hats just yet.

DR DAVID LOVE: Certainly not. I think most of Hawker are fairly flexible buildings, wooden structures, and even in a large earthquake they should survive fairly well.

MRS HENDERSON: If it's going to come, it'll come no matter where you are, so that doesn't worry me, that's life in Hawker.