Did you feel a tremor around 8:45 last night? Or maybe those in the south felt one at 6:45 this morning. If you felt either of them, it wasn’t your imagination, nor was it post-traumatic stress; those were real, both aftershocks of Thursday morning’s powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The epicenter of the major quake was about 140 miles east of the Stann Creek Coast and caused major structural damage in the villages of Monkey River, Independence and Placencia. As we showed you last night, that structural damage was quite remarkable in Monkey River where many wooden houses on stilts simply sunk into the ground – some sunk as much as eight to ten feet. As we told you last night, that’s called earthquake liquefaction and today geologist Andre Cho explained what causes the strange phenomenon.
Andre Cho, Geologist
“What happens in an earthquake whenever the seismic waves pass through sediment, loose sediments, it is a natural phenomenon for the sediment to become like a liquid just for a short period of time, just a couple seconds, and that
is what is known as liquefaction and that is what causes buildings to sink like what happened in Monkey River. It is on coastal alluvium or sediments which is unconsolidated. So places like Monkey River and Belize City as well, because it is on the coast and it lies on top of unconsolidated sediments or coastal sediments, those places are very vulnerable to liquefaction.”
Jules Vasquez,
We’ve also seen a number of very pronounced fissures on the surface of the ground. What is that as a result of?
Andre Cho,
“Again that is simply a result of the seismic activity, the seismic waves produced from the earthquake and it is just causes breaks on the surface of the ground. So it is shallow, just a couple inches sometimes, but again that is just a common result of an earthquake. It doesn’t pose any risks to building any houses or any other large structures.”
As for the water that gushed out of the ground all over the village, Cho explained that it is the water from within the soil itself which it is forced to the surface. A remarkable and previously unseen phenomenon, but the earthquake’s epicenter was about 150 miles from the coast of Monkey River so that is to be expected.
