Two earthquakes struck Peru’s Junin region on Saturday night, killing at least five people, injuring 21 and tearing through homes in a mountainous area east of Lima. Rescue workers were still searching on Sunday for anyone who may be trapped under the rubble.
The quakes measured 5.1 and 3.7, and early reports from Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute indicated at least 48 homes were destroyed and 18 were damaged. About 300 people were displaced and were being provided with tents, underscoring how quickly the damage spread beyond the immediate collapse sites.
Keiko Fujimori said on Sunday that she deeply regretted the consequences of the earthquake in Junin and expressed condolences to the families of those who died and solidarity with those affected. The quake toll, however, was not settled in the first hours after the disaster: one report put the death count at five, while another said six people had died, a gap that can emerge when officials are still matching hospital reports, field counts and recovery work.
Luis Vasquez said the first estimates pointed to a heavy blow for a region where many homes are built from adobe mud bricks and can fail fast in strong shaking. An unnamed resident of Chongos Bajo said the earthquake destroyed the family home and that many adobe houses had collapsed, a warning that the damage in some neighborhoods was not limited to a few cracked walls but to entire structures coming down.
Peru sits in the Pacific Ring of Fire, the volcanic belt that accounts for about 85 percent of the world’s seismic activity, which is why quakes regularly hit the country. Peru’s National Seismological Center said the first tremor struck at a depth of 24 km and the second at 18 km, while the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre had earlier estimated the first quake at a magnitude of 5.6. Even with the ground already shaking and the damage counted in dozens of homes, the most important question for Sunday remained whether the search teams would find anyone else alive under the debris.
