Quito Earthquake

Within ten minutes of my plane  touching down at Quito´s Mariscal Sucre airport, it was closed. There was a pretty big earthquake nearby. It only lasted about 5-10 seconds, followed by another about 20 seconds later. It was enough to nearly bring the screens down in the airport, well severely shake them anyway, severely shake everything in fact. In addition the power was cut for a few seconds, plunging us into darkness and resetting all the computer systems. Apparently the new multimillion dollar airport doesn't have uninterruptible power supplies.

I was waiting in line in passport control when it happened, at about 3pm local time. The tourists in the que didn't seem very surprised, perhaps they were expecting strange things to happen in a foreign land. But the airport staff were visibly shocked.

It was a quite a powerful quake, I´ve felt a few, in fact every three weeks or so when living in Tokyo, but this was the strongest. Apparently it was only a 5.1 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in Calderon, Northern Quito. That´s probably why it felt to strong to me, Calderon is only only about 5 kilometers from where I was. I took a taxi from the airport to my office at the university. Listening to the radio en route, they are reporting damage to roads and houses, particularly around the epicenter and one of the main routes into the city, the Guasamin tunnel is closed.

From the taxi windows, visibility was low, it´s the dry season at the moment so everything is dusty. The earthquake threw the dust into the air creating a false fog effect. You can even taste the dust in the air now. Sitting in my office, my normally good view of the Andes mountains is just a grey dust cloud.