A magnitude-7.4 earthquake tore through western Colombia at 7:34 a.m. local time on Monday, collapsing buildings in at least four cities and pushing the confirmed death toll past 100 by early afternoon, with officials warning the count would keep rising.
The town itself has a population of only a few thousand, but the shaking radiated across a much larger swath of Colombia's western mountain corridor, the densely populated string of cities running from Quibdó through Pereira, Manizales and Cali that sits closest to the country's active fault systems.
Authorities have been explicit that the count is expected to keep rising as crews reach the remote municipalities in Chocó and Risaralda departments that took the most direct force of the rupture, where communication and road access were already limited before the quake damaged what infrastructure existed.
Why a 7.4 Killed Fewer People Than a Much Smaller Quake Did in 1999 Monday's earthquake released roughly 60 times more energy than the magnitude-6.2 quake that struck Colombia's Quindío region on January 25, 1999.
Washington's Department of Natural Resources lists the Cascadia megathrust as the largest active fault affecting the state, capable of shaking that would reach Bremerton, Silverdale and the rest of Kitsap County directly.
A magnitude-7.4 earthquake killed more than 100 people in Colombia and was felt in three countries. Here's what happened, and why the Cascadia Subduction Zone under Puget Sound is the reason it matters here too.