Puerto Rico Governor Wanda Vazquez on Tuesday declared a state of emergency after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake killed at least one person in the south of the island and caused widespread damage.
Vazquez said that the declaration would allow for the activation of National Guard troops in the US territory still recovering from a devastating 2017 hurricane.
The US Geological Survey said the earthquake struck at 4:24am with the epicenter off the coast of the southern city of Ponce, and was followed by more than a dozen aftershocks.
Photo: AFP
It was the most powerful in a series of tremors that have shaken the island since Dec. 28.
Scientists initially sent out an alert about a potential tsunami, but it was later canceled.
The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said that the quake had forced an automatic shutdown of the power grid, already severely damaged by Hurricane Maria more than two years ago.
The worst damage appeared to be on the southwest coast, including Ponce, Guayanilla and Guanica.
A 73-year-old man died after a wall fell in his home in Ponce, El Nuevo Dia reported.
Eight others in the city were reported injured.
Two power plants in Guayanilla sustained major damage, the power authority said.
The city could be without power for two weeks, Guayanilla Mayor Nelson Torres Yordan said.
Celebrity chef Jose Andres announced that a charity he runs, World Central Kitchen, had started serving meals and distributing solar-powered lamps in quake-hit areas.
Vazquez announced that US$130 million in emergency aid funding would be disbursed.
On social media, people wrote of being shaken awake by the force of the earthquake.
One woman on Twitter said that she had been “wrenched from sleep.”
“Everybody is awake & scared all over,” she tweeted.
Guayanilla’s Inmaculada Concepcion church, built in 1841, was heavily damaged.
Volunteers salvaged statues and other valuable items from the ruins as a priest consoled distraught parishioners.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened