Strong earthquake hits parts of Colombia – NBC Miami (51)

BOGOTA, Colombia – A 6.3-magnitude earthquake shook much of Colombia on Thursday, killing one person and causing minor property damage to homes and roads in Bogota, official sources said.

The dead person, a woman, threw herself from the tenth floor of a building in the Madalena neighborhood in a panic, said Bogotá’s mayor, Claudia Lopez, who assured the city that there were “no services”. The buildings were old, only the youngest were affected.”

“The only reported incident was a woman thrown from the tenth floor of a residential building in Madalina, possibly due to a nervous breakdown,” Lopez said, adding that there were 88 reports of possible damage to buildings in the city. .

There was a damage in the elliptical hall of the Congress of the Republic, where the rose window decorating the vault fell on the seat occupied by the conservative Juan Carlos Vils, but the room was not occupied, so it did not cause major problems.

On the other hand, photos and videos circulating on social networks of the World Trade Center building in the north of Bogotá, where one of the towers can be seen moving towards the other, caused alarm.

However, World Trade Center manager Diego Cordobas assured Blue Radio that “the building was not affected by the afternoon tremors. The extensions between the B and C towers of the building are shown by the community. The networks are an extension of the construction since the beginning of construction about 40 years ago”.

Alexis Orengo, Telemundo 39 meteorologist, explains in this video how earthquakes form.

“There are three independent towers with a floating plate construction system, each of which allows independent movement of residences. There is no impact from tremors,” he explained.

For his part, Olmedo López, director of the National Division for Risk Management (UNGRD), explained that in the first sweep of the country, 15 of the 32 sectors of Colombia reported no effect from the tremor.

“No new developments in human life have been reported,” the official noted.

While describing the information, he indicated that in the city of El Calvario, the epicenter of the earthquake, in the department of Meta, three houses were damaged and there were evacuations, but there were no deaths or injuries.

The highway between Bogotá and Villavicencio, the capital of Meta, was closed due to a landslide, and a month ago, an avalanche in the municipality of Quetame destroyed about twenty houses and killed 26 people.

The earthquake was recorded as 6.3 on the Richter scale United States Geological Survey It shook a good part of Colombia this Thursday afternoon and was centered about 10 miles north of Kumaral, in the Gundinamarca area.

Thirteen minutes after the quake, at 12:17 pm local time, as people began to return to their homes and offices, a magnitude 5.7 earthquake hit the country again.