A powerful magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck south-central Panama on Friday afternoon, collapsing buildings in at least two towns, sending residents into the streets of the capital and triggering tsunami warnings for eleven countries before the threat was called off hours later.
The quake struck just before 3pm local time (20:00 GMT), with its epicenter about 6.2 miles (10km) from the town of Pitaloza Arriba, according to the US Geological Survey, which registered the rupture at a depth of roughly 12 kilometers — shallow enough to amplify shaking at the surface. The agency estimated that about 4.6 million people felt moderate to severe tremors and said the effects were "likely to be widespread." USGS's automated loss-estimate system assigned the quake its highest "red" alert level, a preliminary designation signaling a high likelihood of extensive damage and casualties, though officials cautioned the estimate is provisional and will be revised as ground reports come in.
Collapsed Buildings and a Capital on Edge
Footage shared online showed a side of a colonial-era cathedral in Penonomé collapsing along with one of its spires, and a local hotel that had almost entirely come down. In the town of Soná, residents filmed a man calling out to anyone trapped beneath rubble. No casualties had been reported by Saturday morning, though officials cautioned that the full extent of the damage was still unclear.
Ricardo Brown, a 74-year-old resident of the southern Herrera province, told Reuters the quake had cracked his home in the Las Minas neighborhood.
"We're scared. It's just the two of us old folks here. The house has cracked and we're afraid it could fall on us."
Ricardo Brown, Herrera province resident, to Reuters
In Panama City, roughly 200 kilometers from the epicenter, workers and residents evacuated offices and a maternity ward, gathering in parks and streets until the shaking stopped; officials said damage there appeared limited to debris falling from rooftops. President José Raúl Mulino said his government was mobilizing fully in response, telling citizens that what happened "should not be used to cause alarm or disorder." The Panama Canal Authority confirmed the waterway itself, a vital artery for global shipping, was unaffected and continued normal operations. Panama City's international airport briefly closed and the capital's metro suspended two lines as a precaution, even as officials said the deepest damage was concentrated in the central provinces of Veraguas, Herrera and Los Santos — detail that emerged in coverage from reporters who reached the disaster zone directly.
A Region on Alert, Aftershocks Continue
Tsunami warnings were issued for eleven countries along Panama's coastlines before the US Tsunami Warning System confirmed there was no threat. Several large aftershocks followed the main quake, including a magnitude 6.6 jolt near Río Grande and a 6.0 near La Tronosa recorded by USGS in the hours afterward, complicating inspection and rescue efforts on the ground.
The earthquake struck just three days before Panama had been scheduled to hold a nationwide evacuation drill rehearsing the response to a major earthquake, a coincidence officials said underscored the risks the exercise was designed to address. It also follows a string of destructive earthquakes elsewhere in the region this year, including in Colombia and Venezuela. Panama sits near the boundary of the Cocos and Caribbean tectonic plates, a seismically active zone that has produced several earthquakes above magnitude 6 in the past five years, though Friday's rupture was significantly larger than most recent events there.
The quake's maximum shaking intensity was measured at level 9 on the scale USGS uses to model ground motion — the kind of violent shaking capable of toppling masonry structures such as the Penonomé cathedral, and far above the lighter shaking that left the capital with mostly debris-related damage.
With no deaths yet confirmed and the full damage picture still emerging from Penonomé, Soná and surrounding areas, the gap between the "red" alert's worst-case modeling and the damage reported so far is likely to narrow or widen over the coming days as USGS and Panamanian authorities continue assessing the quake and its ongoing aftershock sequence.
