Espiritu Santo sits directly above the New Hebrides subduction zone, where one plate dives beneath the other. Many of the earthquakes on this page begin 100 km or more down, under the sea north and east of town. That depth is a large part of why Luganville can record ten quakes in a month and feel almost none of them.
The exception was 30 March 2026. A magnitude 7.3 struck about 50 km east-north-east of town and 121 km down, by the USGS's measurement. Nobody was killed, but buildings were damaged, the Sunshine Shopping Centre was badly hit, the airstrip cracked, shops lost their stock off the shelves, and Northern Provincial Hospital ran at about half capacity while engineers checked its buildings. Red Corner, Maritime College, Dinh Shipping, the Radio Station area, St Michel School and St Michel village had no tap water for two weeks.
It was not the first. A magnitude 7.2 in August 2007 cracked the main street. In December 2024 a magnitude 7.3 near Port Vila killed fourteen people, and a Luganville builder said after the March quake that a stronger one would have brought a building down. Cyclone Harold damaged somewhere between half and seven in ten of this town's buildings in 2020, so a good deal of what is standing has already taken a beating.
Two things worth knowing about the list above. USGS records very little here below about magnitude 4, so the page is set to magnitude 4 within 200 km, which is close to everything its feed carries for this area. And hardly any quake near Luganville ever gets a felt report, so the Shaking column usually says "Not reported" rather than guessing that nobody felt it — if you felt one, the VMGD form above is where to say so.