A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck southern Panama on Friday, damaging buildings, sending thousands of people into the streets and rattling the capital, Panama City. Early reporting indicated the country had escaped widespread destruction, with no deaths immediately reported.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake hit at a shallow depth of about 12.6 kilometres, with an epicentre in a sparsely populated area roughly 200 kilometres from the capital. The survey’s exposure estimates suggested about 43,000 people lived in areas with at least severe exposure to the shaking, considerably fewer than in other recent deadly quakes in the region.
More than 40 aftershocks followed in the hours after the main tremor, and a second strong quake of magnitude 6.6 was also recorded on Friday afternoon. Despite the force of the shaking, key infrastructure kept working. The Panama Canal and a major copper mine reported normal operations, and the international airport lifted a temporary suspension of flights.
The president travelled to a city about halfway between the epicentre and the capital, where some buildings had collapsed and a church was damaged. In Panama City’s business district, office workers who had evacuated their buildings faced long journeys home through congested streets.
The contrast with the region’s recent history is stark. Back-to-back earthquakes in a neighbouring country in June killed several thousand people, and another quake in August killed more than 300. Panama’s sparse population near the epicentre appears, on the first day at least, to have spared it a similar toll, though assessments were still under way.
Seismologists note that shallow earthquakes like Friday’s tend to be felt more intensely at the surface, which makes the apparently limited damage all the more notable. Attention in the coming days will turn to the buildings that did fail near the epicentre, and to whether schools, hospitals and older housing in the affected provinces need closer inspection before normal routines fully resume.
