Colombia shook again on Wednesday, two weeks after the strongest earthquake of the century there. The Colombian Geological Service put a magnitude 5.1 tremor at 11:45 a.m. local time, 149 kilometers down, about 7 kilometers from Los Santos in Santander. The agency’s updated bulletin, posted to its official account, listed coordinates near 6.82 north, 73.11 west, and asked people who felt it to report in. Gestión, citing that bulletin, said the shaking was felt clearly in Bucaramanga and nearby towns, and as far as Cúcuta, Tunja, and Bogotá. Pulzo said disaster agencies were still checking for damage and injuries. Gestión added that as of publication there were no reports of serious damage or victims from Wednesday’s quake.
The nerves are leftover from August 10. That morning a magnitude 7.4 quake struck at 7:34 a.m. near San José del Palmar in the Pacific department of Chocó, at a depth of roughly 110 kilometers. It was the most powerful seismic event in Colombia this century. On Tuesday the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, UNGRD, raised the death toll to 331. It said 240 people were still missing, 4,449 had been injured, and 364 had been pulled out alive. The agency counted 406,273 people from 188,034 families as affected, across 494 municipalities in 16 of the country’s 32 departments. The figures, it said, were still preliminary.
The August 10 destruction is the reason a 5.1 in Santander empties office stairwells in the capital. UNGRD’s Tuesday tally put 33,275 homes completely destroyed and 185,889 damaged. It listed harm to 376 health centers, 3,819 schools, 4,337 community buildings, 440 roads, 74 vehicle bridges, 17 pedestrian bridges, five airports, and 119 water systems. Los Santos sits on a well-known intermediate-depth nest of earthquakes; a deep 5.1 there is felt over a wide area even when it does not pancake a town. Wednesday’s job for local officials was the unglamorous one: walk the buildings, check the pipes, and tell people in Bogotá and Bucaramanga whether they could go back inside.
Sources: Servicio Geológico Colombiano (via Gestión and Pulzo); Anadolu Agency.