An earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale struck Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, on Thursday night, eight hours after another earthquake, measuring 6.1, that killed one person.
The new tremor occurred at 8:15 p.m. (02:15 a.m. on Friday in Lisbon) and had as its epicenter the same region in the center of the country where the first earthquake occurred, the Colombian Geological Service (SGC) announced.
According to the SGC, the epicenter of this aftershock was located in the municipality of Restrepo, very close to Bogotá, and it was felt intensely because it occurred at a “superficial” depth, less than 30 kilometers.
The Colombian capital had already been hit, at 12:04 p.m. (1804 GMT), by an earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, which shook buildings and sent thousands of people to the streets in search of shelter.
The earthquake had an epicenter at a depth of 30 kilometers, near the town of El Calvario, in the north of the department of Meta, in central Colombia, 40 kilometers southeast of the capital.
In El Calvario, at least four houses suffered considerable damage, according to local authorities.
The first earthquake left only one victim, a woman who jumped from the window of an apartment located on the seventh floor of a building in the Colombian capital in a panic and died when she fell to the ground.
The mayoress of Bogotá, Claudia López, assured that in the city “none of the services or buildings had major damage, only minor ones,” including the fall of part of the roof of the plenary session of the Colombian parliament, which at the time was empty.
About 10 minutes after the first earthquake, a second one occurred, of magnitude 5.6, with no visible damage to buildings in Bogotá, a city of about eight million inhabitants.
The highway between Bogotá and Villavicencio, capital of the Meta department, was closed preventively due to possible landslides, since last month a landslide in the municipality of Quetame left 26 dead and twenty houses destroyed.
Source: TSF
