Twice, during my time here, people have asked me, "Did you feel that earthquake, yesterday? What did you think?" At the time, even though I had been up and somewhere around town, I hadn't noticed a thing.
Last night, however, was another story. I woke up at 2:24AM, local time, and was definitely feeling something. At first, I thought it was just another rain storm with a lot of strong wind. Then I noticed that it wasn't raining, it wasn't windy, and it felt the same as when you're at the beach, being carried in to shore by an ocean wave.
Well, in fact, I
WAS at the top of a wave, but it wasn't an ocean wave. It was a seismic wave.
The 7.1 earthquake was centered to the Northwest of the Bay Islands, so I imagine they sustained some damage, but not here, in La Ceiba. Farther West, in Cortés, there was some damage. In fact, a boy (13-15, depending upon which paper you read) was killed when his house collapsed onto him. Damage has also been reported in Belize.
During the quake, the power here, in La Ceiba, went out twice, but only for a few seconds. Shortly after the second outage, though, the Internet also went out. When I got up again, in the morning, the Internet was back on, but it went out, for a few minutes, as I was checking the websites of the various local papers for news about the quake.
Here are some of the news reports:
Fox news,
La Prensa and
El Heraldo
