At least one person died in Bogotá and slight material damage to homes and roads left a 6.1-magnitude tremor that shook a large part of Colombia on Thursday, official sources reported.
The deceased person was a woman who, in the midst of panic, jumped from the tenth floor of a building in the Madelena neighborhood, reported the mayor of Bogotá, Claudia López, who assured that in the city “none of the services nor the buildings were affected older, only younger.”
“The only serious incident reported was the throwing of a woman from the tenth floor of a residential building in Madelena, apparently due to nervous disorder,” said López, who added that they have received 88 reports of possible damage to buildings in the city. .
One of the damages occurred in the Elliptical Hall of the Congress of the Republic, where a rose window that adorns the vault fell on the seat occupied by the conservative Juan Carlos Wills, but the chamber was unoccupied, so it did not cause major problems.
On the other hand, the photos and videos that circulated on social networks of the World Trade Center building, in the north of Bogotá, where it can be seen that one of the towers had moved towards another, caused alarm.
However, Diego Cordobés, manager of the World Trade Center, assured Blu Radio that “the building did not generate any type of affectation with the tremor that occurred at noon. The expansions between towers B and C of the building that are being shown by social networks is a dilation of construction since the beginning of construction about 40 years ago”.
He explained that “there are three independent towers that had a floating plate construction method, which allows each of the structures to have movement of independent settlements. There is no affectation by the tremor.”
For his part, the director of the National Unit for Risk Management (UNGRD), Olmedo López, explained that in a first sweep of the country, 15 of the 32 departments of Colombia have not reported effects from the tremor.
“No new developments in human lives have been reported,” the official remarked.
When detailing the information, he indicated that in the town of El Calvario, the epicenter of the earthquake, in the department of Meta (center), damage was reported to three houses and that there were preventive evacuations, but there were no deaths or injuries.
On the highway between Bogotá and Villavicencio, the capital of Meta, there was a preventive closure due to landslides, since a month ago, an avalanche in the municipality of Quetame killed about twenty homes and the lives of 26 people.
The magnitude 6.1 tremor shook a large part of Colombia at noon this Thursday. According to the Colombian Geological Service, the earthquake, which had initially been calculated as a magnitude 5.9, was actually 6.1 and occurred at 12:04 local time (17:04 GMT), with a “superficial depth, less 30 kilometers”.
Thirteen minutes after the tremor, at 12:17 local time (17:17 GMT), when people were beginning to return to their homes and offices, a magnitude 5.6 aftershock struck the country again.
