A morning earthquake shook the Colombian capital, Bogota, on Monday, sending tremors through the city and leaving officials with two slightly different readings of the same event. witnesses said the shaking was felt as far away as the border with Venezuela.
The Colombian geological service put the quake at magnitude 6.7 and said the epicenter was in Choco province on the Pacific coast. Colombia's National Unit for Disaster Risk Management gave it a magnitude of 6.6, placed the epicenter near San José del Palmar and said it struck at a depth of 79 km.
That gap matters because a difference of 0.1 in magnitude can reflect separate instruments, separate calculations or a revision still working its way through the data. For people in Bogota, the more immediate question was not which number would win out, but whether the shaking had caused harm beyond a frightening start to the day.
UNGRD said it was communicating with local authorities to verify possible damage, and that is where the story now rests. The quake was strong enough to be felt far beyond the capital, yet no damage tally had been set out in the information available Monday, leaving the first official task focused on confirmation rather than cleanup.
