BOGOTA (COLOMBIA), AUG 10 (AP): A powerful 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck western Colom-bia on Monday, killing at least 111 people and damaging hundreds of buildings, President Abelardo de la Espriella said.
The president declared an emergency, which will expedite funding for the quake recovery, and said he would visit the disaster zone, centered round the rural region of Choco.
The epicentre was in San Jose Del Palmar, a community of about 4,800 people in the Choco region, about 250 miles (400 kilometres) west of Bogota, the US Geological Survey and Colombia’s counter-part reported. The USGS said it struck at a depth of 66 miles (107 kilometres). The quake was also felt in neighbouring Ecuador and Panama, though minimal damage was reported there.
Authorities also confirmed nine people were killed in Choco, two more in the Caldas region and a 73-year-old in the Antioquia region. Many more people across the country were injured.
The quake left cities across the west of the country — Pereira, Quibdo, Cali and Manizales — rav-aged. Residents and search teams picked through the rubble of collapsed buildings amid concerns by authorities of aftershocks. Colombia’s interior minister said more than 20 municipalities across the country had been hit.
Colombia’s Pacific region around the quake’s epicentre lies along the “Ring of Fire”, the line of seismic faults encircling the Pacific Ocean where most of the world’s earthquakes occur. The Pacific, particu-larly the Choco region, is one of the poorest regions in the country.
Nestled in the dense jungle, much of Choco is highly rural and only reachable by boat or plane, which may pose a problem for authorities in assessing the wider toll.
