At least two people died this Monday in Haiti after a earthquake of magnitude 5.3 on the Richter scale, which had several aftershocks. This Sunday had been reported in the country another earthquake of magnitude 4.3.
One of the victims died in Anse-a-Veau, a small coastal town 130 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince, collapse a wall. The second death, in Fond-des-Negres, 20 kilometers further south, was caused by a landslide.
The earthquake was recorded at 08:16 local time (13h16 GMT) and felt in the capital. It was followed by a ten new tremors, including a magnitude 5.1 aftershock less than an hour later.
The Dominican newspaper Diario Libre reported that the National Seismology System registered the tremor in the south of the Haitian province Anse-a-Veau and that had aftershocks of 2.6 degrees 5.7 km south of Cabral, in Barahona.
The geologist and member of the Academy of Sciences of the Dominican Republic, Osiris de León, reported through his Twitter account that “two strong earthquakes, both of magnitude 5.3, have occurred in just one hour near Miragoane, west from Port-au-Prince and northeast of Los Cayos”.
“Suggests seismic rupture process in the central area of the southern peninsula of Haiti“, he opined.
It is Sunday, had been reported another earthquake of magnitude 4.3 on the Richter scale 30 km west of Mole Saint-Nicolas.
According to the Sputnik agency, in 2021, experts reported at least 1,647 earthquakes in Haiti. The largest occurred on August 14: it was a magnitude 7.2, killing more than 2,200 people and destroying or seriously damaging tens of thousands of homes.
The most serious earthquake in recent years, however, occurred in 2010 and left 200,000 dead and 300,000 injured.