A violent earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale killed at least 16 people in southern Ecuador and one in northern Peru overnight from Saturday to Sunday. It was felt in 13 of Ecuador’s 24 provinces and President Guillermo Lasso appealed for calm.
with our correspondent in Quito, Eric Samson
The epicenter of the earthquake was located in the small town of Balao, of 28,000 inhabitants, two hours from the port of Guayaquil. This is an area surrounded by mangroves which probably limited the strength of the surface waves, the only good news of the evening.
However, the damage was significant, especially in the south of the country. More than a dozen people have died in the Province del Oro where a wharf collapsed into the sea in Puerto Bolivar. In the city of Cuenca, a house did not resist the tremor. Its walls fell on cars parked on the street, killing at least one person. Nearly 60 houses were destroyed or damaged as well as 17 schools, more than 30 health centers and a bridge in the north of the country, according to a still provisional report at the start of the evening.
Peru also affected
A four-year-old girl also died in the Peruvian town of Tumbes. Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso appealed for calm and visited some of the approximately 160 injured people being treated in hospitals in Guayaquil, Cuenca and Machala.
Funds have been released urgently to start repairing damaged roads and infrastructure as people spend the night outside for fear of aftershocks.
The memory of the devastating earthquake that shook Ecuador in 2016 is still fresh in people’s minds. With a magnitude of 7.8, the quake killed 673 people and destroyed coastal villages. The losses had been estimated at more than three billion euros, specifies Agence France presse.
“It is a relatively high magnitude for (…) the country”, explained in an interview with local radio FM Mundo Mario Ruiz, director of the Ecuadorian Geophysical Institute, about this last earthquake. “In the region of the Gulf of Guayaquil, we have had since 2017 (…) about two earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 5.0 per year,” he recalled.