QCOSTARICA from Retireforlessincostarica.com – According to a CNN article today, “the death toll from Ecuador’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake climbed to 654 Saturday evening, according to the country’s Risk Management Office.
The agency also reported that 58 people remain missing since the April 16 quake and 12,492 are injured. It also announced that almost 26,091 people remain in shelters.”
We have friends living in Ecuador, so this tragedy hits home for us, and we join the rest of the world in mourning the loss of so many lives and the massive destruction.
With the Equador earthquake on our hearts and minds, we thought it was a good time to look at the earthquake statistics for Costa Rica and make them available for our readers.
In researching this, I found the most complete and reliable source of data to be the Significant Earthquake Database of the U.S. National Geophysical Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). You will need to enlarge the chart below by clicking on it. The chart includes the dates of all significant earthquakes in Costa Rica for the past 100 years, indicates if there was a tsunami associated with the quake, gives the location, depth and magnitude of each quake, and records the loss of life, injuries, and property damage.
Source Retireforlessincostarica.com
Costa Rica 1991 April 22 21:56 UTC Magnitude 7.6
From Significant Earthquakes of the World 1991.
Forty-seven people killed, 109 injured, 7,439 homeless and severe damage (IX) in the Limon-Pandora area. Intensity X was observed in some zones of liquefaction within the epicentral area. Some damage (VI) also occurred in the San Jose-Alajuela area and landslides blocked roads between Limon and central Costa Rica. Twenty-eight people killed, 454 injured, 2,400 homeless and 866 buildings destroyed (VII-VIII) in the Guabito-Almirante-Bocas del Toro area, Panama. Slight damage (VI) also occurred at David and Puerto Armuelles, Panama. Felt (IV) at Colon and (III) at Panama City.
Felt (III) in eastern El Salvador and (II) at San Salvador. Also felt in Nicaragua and Honduras and on San Andres Island, Colombia. Maximum uplift of 1.4 meters was observed near Limon and sandblows and liquefaction caused subsidence of soils in the Bocas del Toro area.
Ground cracks also occurred in the epicentral area. A 2-meter tsunami with maximum runup of 300 meters was observed in the Cahuita-Puerto Viejo area, Costa Rica. Tsunamis were also reported on Bastimentos, Carenero and Colon Islands and at Portobelo, Panama.
The maximum amplitude of the tsunami in Panama was about 0.6 m. A 7-cm tsunami (peak-to-trough) was recorded on the tide gauge at Cristobal, Panama. Damage in Costa Rica estimated to be about 43 million U.S. dollars.
