There is an expression that comes up frequently in conversations among Puerto Ricans: “After the hurricane”, they usually say when chatting about the timeline of their lives after 2017. They talk about Hurricane Maria, which in September that year devastated the island and killed 4,600 people. The event left an immense impression on their collective memory.
The year 2020 dawned on the people of southwestern Puerto Rico with a 6.4-magnitude tremor on the Ritcher scale, the largest in a chain of earthquakes, some 1,800, that began on December 28th.
There are at least 746 refugees. Eight are injured.
A 73-year-old man died in Ponce when the wall of his house came down on him.
In the town of Guánica, 28 buildings were left totally collapsed, 99 were damaged and 21 are about to fall, according to the count of the mayor of Guánica, Santos Seda, as the newspaper El Nuevo Día reports. In the meantime, rock slides continue to occur.
In the municipality of Guayanilla, the earthquake collapsed the church of the Immaculate Conception, built in 1841, and 31 buildings were destroyed.
In Yauco, 30 homes collapsed
Governor Wanda Vazquez declared on Tuesday an emergency throughout Puerto Rico and deployed the National Guard to respond to the damage. Late that evening, Vazquez announced that U.S. President Donald Trump had signed her request for a declaration of emergency.
A few minutes ago I received a call from the Acting Administrator of @fema, Pete Gaynor, @FEMA_Pete to notify me that President @realDonaldTrump had signed our request for an Emergency Declaration for Puerto Rico.
— Lcda. Wanda Vázquez Garced (@wandavazquezg) January 8, 2020
It remains to be seen what concrete measures and assistance for the island the Trump government will implement, although the declaration of emergency triggers the immediate purchase of materials and the activation of essential services.
“Two years after Hurricane Maria, nature has once again revealed the fragility of the island’s essential infrastructure, while thousands of people are once again facing the reality of not knowing if government aid will reach them,” Keyla Lopez Alicea and Laura M Quintero write in their El Nuevo Día report.
In Puerto Rico, the denial by former Governors Rosello’s of the 2017 hurricane death toll as well as Trump’s disdain for the tragedy still weigh heavily.
“I consider this crisis to be worse than Hurricane Maria,” said Guanica Mayor Santos Seda at a press conference, quoted by El Nuevo Día. “An earthquake does not warn, we do not know where it is coming from, we do not know how it will strike. Unfortunately this has been [he means biggest earthquake], at night, close to morning when it is still dark, it has caught us sleeping.”
It’s been 102 years since the island has had an earthquake of this magnitude. The last strongest 7.3 magnitude temblor occurred in Puerto Rico in 1918. It hit the northwest and killed 116 people.
Tuesday’s quake and the chain of quakes that have preceded it since December 28 are part of a “seismic sequence,” as geologists call it. A major earthquake is followed by aftershocks but is also preceded by “precursors”. What experts do not know, according to BBC Mundo, is whether Tuesday’s earthquake was the main one or it is yet to come.
“We are also talking about something that we cannot predict,” warned Governor Wanda Vazquez, as she called citizens to activate their own emergency protocols.
Puerto Rico is located within a seismic zone, between two tectonic plates: the North American plate to the north and the Caribbean plate to the south. Victor Huérfano, acting director of the Puerto Rico Seismic Network, explained to the BBC Mundo that the island is subject to the pressures of these two plates. Alberto Lopez Venegas, a researcher with the same Seismic Network, said that despite having characteristics that make the island prone to earthquakes, it is not common in Puerto Rico for 1800 earthquakes to occur in less than two weeks. “We are seeing an activation that we probably won’t see again in the next 500 or 1,000 years,” he said.
Experts assert it is common for earthquakes to occur near the surface in the southwest. However, what’s not common is for them to be as close to the coast as they were this week, John Bellini, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told the Associated Press correspondent Dánica Coto. According to Bellini, most major earthquakes occur 60 to 80 miles from the north coast, like the five ones that have struck Puerto Rico since 1950, with magnitudes of 6.0 or more.
Technology does not have the ability to predict earthquakes, experts say, but through observation it is possible to predict that telluric movements will continue in the coming days.
“The plates are still there, the fault lines are still there, the movement is still there, the accumulation of energy will still be there, and we will continue to investigate what is happening,” Victor Huérfano told BBC Mundo.
A blackout on the whole island followed Tuesday’s earthquake, because the Electric Power Authority stopped generating electricity as a protection measure. The restoration of electricity will be progressive. (With Maria several areas of the territory remained without electric power during almost a year.)
The effects of this natural event are this time very localized. With the exception of the blackout, the rest of the island is still operating. But for some people who spoke with AP correspondent Danica Coto, the earthquake evokes Hurricane Maria, although the magnitude of the 2017 natural disaster is still unmatched. Coto talked about this in a conversation with U.S. public radio NPR. Many people are looking for water, fuel and food in their communities, Coto reported. Host Ari Shapiro asked her about the psychological impact of this earthquake on Hurricane Maria survivors. The emotional connection is inevitable. “People are quite greatly affected emotionally. I spoke to one man who was petrified of earthquakes. He plans to set up his hammocks outside. There are very few people that I spoke to that said they planned on spending their nights inside their homes.”
Photo: Puerto Rico desde el Aire