A 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck near southern Puerto Rico on Saturday, briefly knocking out power and forcing the relocation of at least 50 families on an island where some people still remain in shelters from previous quakes earlier this year. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
May 2,2020
A 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck near southern Puerto Rico on Saturday, briefly knocking out power and forcing the relocation of at least 50 families on an island where some people still remain in shelters from previous quakes earlier this year. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The U. S. Geological Survey said the quake hit at a depth of 5.6 miles (nine kilometers) near the city of Ponce and the towns of Guanica and Guayanilla, where hundreds of homes were destroyed by a quake in early January that killed one person and caused millions of dollars in damage.
The earthquake cracked walls, flung goods off supermarket shelves and caused a second-story balcony to crash in the southern coastal city of Ponce. It occurred amid a two-month lockdown and just hours after the government announced the biggest spike in COVID-19 cases since the first one was reported in March in the U. S. territory.
„This is a crisis on top of another crisis,“ said Health Secretary Lorenzo González.
Most of the damage was reported in Ponce, where officials were still going neighborhood by neighborhood to assess damage as rescue crews fanned out across the region.
