Officers say efforts to evaluate harm are underneath manner after 6.8-magnitude earthquake hits japanese Cuba.
A robust earthquake has hit japanese Cuba, including extra issues to a rustic nonetheless reeling from a collection of recent storms and blackouts.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) reported on Sunday {that a} magnitude 6.8 earthquake hit about 40km (25 miles) south of the city of Bartolome Maso. No deaths or accidents have been reported thus far.
“There have been landslides, harm to houses and energy strains,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel mentioned in a social media submit, including that the areas of Santiago de Cuba and Granma have been affected.
“We’re starting to evaluate the harm in an effort to start restoration. The primary and most essential factor is to avoid wasting lives,” he mentioned.
Individuals in affected provinces have mentioned the earthquake was probably the most highly effective they’ve felt of their lives – no small feat in an space that the USGS says has skilled 23 earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above within the final 50 years.
“We’ve felt earthquakes prior to now, however nothing like this,” Santiago resident Griselda Fernandez advised the Reuters information company.
Different residents in Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest metropolis, reported that the quake brought on buildings to shake and that many individuals have been nonetheless standing nervously of their doorways.
“You needed to see how all the pieces was shifting, the partitions, all the pieces,” Yolanda Tabio, a 76-year-old within the metropolis, advised The Related Press.
Lots of the area’s houses and buildings are older and susceptible to earthquake harm.
State-run media printed photographs of terracota roofs and facades of concrete block houses that had collapsed with the shake. Many photographs confirmed structural harm to ceilings, partitions, home windows columns in addition to to public infrastructure.
The USGS mentioned that close by international locations comparable to Jamaica additionally felt some results.
The tremor is the most recent in a collection of pure disasters which have compounded current infrastructure issues in Cuba, the place giant swaths of the inhabitants additionally face financial insecurity.
In October, Hurricane Oscar introduced heavy rains and widespread energy outages to the island and left not less than six individuals useless after making landfall in japanese Cuba.
One other storm, Hurricane Rafael, knocked out energy for not less than 10 million individuals after slamming into the japanese a part of the island final week.
The storm uprooted bushes and knocked down phone poles. Lots of of buildings have been destroyed and tons of of hundreds of individuals have been displaced.
