Earthquake Strikes Puerto Rico, Toppling a Well-Known Natural Wonder

The natural wonder in the town of Guayanilla, shaped like a round stone window with a stunning view of the ocean, had begun to look vulnerable after smaller temblors started to hit the area a week ago, Mayor Nelson Torres Yordán said. On Monday, he said, “it finally fell.”

The quake struck at 6:32 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was the strongest yet to be felt in the coastal towns west of the city of Ponce that have been trembling for more than a week. The rash of smaller temblors began with three shakes of 4.7, 5.0 and 4.7 magnitude in the space of three hours during the night of Dec. 28-29 and have continued since then, clustered in the same area a few miles offshore. No tsunami threat has been reported.

“It started shaking a bit, but then, all of a sudden, we felt a jolt — I’d never seen anything like it,” said José Francisco Benítez, 48, who was awakened by the quake at a beach resort in the town of Guánica. “Everything shook.”

He said he ran outside in a panic, along with everyone else. “There were people in their underwear in the parking lot, everyone in pajamas, little kids,” Benítez said. “It looked like a movie.”

A strong, 4.9-magnitude aftershock struck about four hours after the big quake, rattling nerves again.

Officials warned of possible mudslides and urged people to stay off the roads in the area to allow emergency personnel to assess the damage. Monday is Three Kings Day, a holiday in Puerto Rico that is also known as the Feast of the Epiphany. Benítez, who had traveled to Guánica for the long weekend, said he planned to quickly return to San Juan, the capital.

Mayor Santos Seda of Guánica, where some of the most serious damage was reported, told NotiCentro, a local news station, that at least four houses had collapsed. His interview was cut short when his telephone call to the station was dropped. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority reported local outages as a result of the temblor.

Photos posted on social media showed severe cracks in the walls of older raised homes in the area and partial collapses of some.

In Guayanilla, emergency workers helped a couple and two children whose elevated house collapsed, burying three cars that had been parked underneath. The man who lived inside, identified only by his first name, Alan, described to NotiCentro the harrowing moment in which the earth trembled, waking him up as the floor gave way.

“The house fell with us in it,” he said, standing outside barefoot with two bloody scratches on his leg. “The house collapsed, ‘Boom!’ ”

He picked up one of his children, his wife grabbed the other one, and they made their way out the door. The house had stood on 12 columns about 8 feet tall. The automobiles below appeared to stave off a complete collapse of the roof, he said.

“We’re alive, thank God, because of the cars,” he said.

His wife said they would be unable to salvage the Three Kings Day gifts they had purchased for the children — a pair of bicycles, stowed in the trunk of one of the cars. The interview was dramatically interrupted by the strong aftershock, which made the woman and the reporter scream and rush off camera to a safer side of the street, away from power lines and poles.

Torres said the town planned to open a shelter for people whose homes were too badly damaged to occupy. He urged the island’s government in San Juan to send social workers to the region to ease people’s nerves.

“Things are really very tense about what has been going on, because this is not normal — so many tremors,” he said.

Elizabeth Vanacore, a seismologist with the Puerto Rico Seismic Network, said people felt the recent quakes because they were shallow and occurred near land.

“People can expect to feel more earthquakes over the next few days, especially given its location near the coast,” Vanacore said.

Puerto Rico lies near the border of the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates.

“We’re just as likely to have earthquakes as a place like California, Japan, New Zealand, Alaska,” Vanacore said.

The island has seen damaging quakes in the past, including one near the island’s northwest coast in 1918 that triggered a tsunami and killed 118 people, according to the Geological Service. But major earthquakes in the southwestern part of Puerto Rico have been unusual in recent history. The last significant temblors recorded in that area, in 1991 and 1999, had a magnitude of about 4.1 on the Richter scale, according to the Seismic Network, whose data dates back to 1986.

“While we can’t predict earthquakes, what the public can do is prepare,” Vanacore said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Earthquake Strikes Puerto Rico, Toppling a Well-Known Natural Wonder

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