Earthquake Strikes Puerto Rico, Toppling Homes and a Natural Wonder

“I worry that I’m going to be homeless,” he said.

Minutes later, the earth rumbled again.

The strong earthquake and persistent aftershocks that rattled Puerto Rico on Monday damaged vulnerable homes, destroyed a photogenic rock formation and terrified residents scarred by recent hurricanes about the prospect of another devastating disaster.

The quake, which struck at 6:32 a.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, was the strongest 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 tremors 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.

“All of Puerto Rico obviously felt this temblor,” Gov. Wanda Vázquez said, adding that no one was seriously hurt.

Classes at local public schools, which were scheduled to resume Tuesday after a holiday break, were pushed back until Jan. 13 to give inspectors time to check buildings for damage, she said. Schools will conduct earthquake drills the day they reopen, the governor added.

At least one school in the town of Guayanilla was being used as a shelter Monday afternoon. Inside another shelter in the town of Guánica, where 31 people sought a safe place to stay, a group of evacuees prayed.

The coastal rock formation known as Punta Ventana, a natural wonder and tourist attraction shaped like a round stone window with a stunning view of the ocean in Guayanilla, had begun to look vulnerable after smaller quakes started to hit the area a week ago, Mayor Nelson Torres Yordán said. On Monday, he said, “it finally fell.”

Puerto Ricans are particularly fond of memes, and they quickly shared one showing the collapsed natural arch covered with a blue tarpaulin like the ones that still cover many homes whose roofs were damaged during Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Among them was Rodríguez’s house in the Esperanza neighborhood of Guánica, where some of the most serious damage was reported, including five collapsed houses. Now, in addition to the tarp he has had since Maria, Rodríguez’s house has huge cracks running up and down his green interior walls.

“It cracked open everywhere inside,” said Rodríguez, 83, a retired bus driver.

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The first cracks appeared a few days ago, after the first temblors. They worsened Monday, and pipes in the bathroom broke, leading to some flooding.

Luz Dastas, 51, whose house in Guánica is also covered by a leaky blue tarp, left with her 26-year-old daughter, Aida Torres, after the first tremors. Monday’s quake opened new cracks in the walls of her house.

When her granddaughter, Alondra Suárez, 7, felt the earth shake one recent night, “I stayed up until the morning,” Alondra said. “I ate a chocolate to see if I could feel better.”

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On Monday, strong aftershocks of 4.9, 4.3 and 4.4 magnitude continued to rock the island into the late afternoon, rattling nerves over and over again. Officials warned of possible mudslides and urged people to stay off the roads to allow emergency personnel to assess the damage.

As a result of the quake, the electricity went out across a swath of southwestern Puerto Rico. Vázquez, who toured some of the damage, said she expected power to be restored in Guánica by Tuesday morning.

Monday was Three Kings Day, a holiday in Puerto Rico that is also known as the Feast of the Epiphany. Towns in the area of the quake went ahead with holiday parades Monday, though some attendees said they felt jittery. José Francisco Benítez, 48, who had traveled to Guánica for the long weekend, said he planned to quickly return to San Juan, the capital.

Benítez was awakened by the quake at a beach resort in Guánica.

“It started shaking a bit, but then, all of a sudden, we felt a jolt — I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “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.”

Supporting columns crumbled underneath Silvestre Alicea’s elevated light green house with white trim, leaving the toppled structure — built on tall columns to protect it from flooding —perched at a precarious angle, with one end of the home tilted skyward. A big Puerto Rican flag waved from the balcony, which now was so near the ground it looked more like a porch.

“Look at my house,” said Alicea, 66, who returned to Puerto Rico from Brooklyn two years ago, moving in to the house he had built over the course of 30 years in preparation for his retirement. “I was there, in there,” he said.

Alicea said he planned to spend the night at his sister’s house nearby but could not think further into the future. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.

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In Guayanilla, emergency workers helped a couple and two children whose elevated house collapsed, burying three cars parked underneath. The man who lived inside, Alan Martínez, 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 a dozen 8-foot columns. 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, Edlin Ortiz, said they would be unable to salvage the Three Kings Day gifts they had bought for the children — a pair of bicycles, stowed in the trunk of one of the cars. The interview was interrupted by a strong aftershock, which made the woman and a reporter scream and rush off camera to a safer side of the street, away from power lines and poles.

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Torres of Guayanilla said the town opened 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.

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The island has seen damaging quakes in the past, including one near the island’s northwestern coast in 1918 that triggered a tsunami and killed 118 people, according to the Geological Survey. 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, 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 Homes and a Natural Wonder

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