A LETTERKENNY man has recalled how he had to run for safety as he experienced the recent 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Colombia.
Rhys Mullen works remotely in sales for a US company and lives in the Colombian city of Medellín, which is about six hours away from the capital Bogotá.
Last Monday’s earthquake – the strongest in Colombia this decade – has claimed the lives of almost 300 people, according to the country’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD). Almost 4,000 people were injured and an estimated 320 people remain missing.
At 7:34am on the morning of August 10, Rhys had just started work when he noticed his apartment beginning to shake around him.
At first, the 25-year-old wasn’t too worried as small earthquakes are a normal occurrence in Colombia.
“We get earthquakes here all the time because Colombia is on the fault line,” Rhys explains.
“Usually every couple of weeks you’ll get like a two or a three kind of earthquake where it’s just a little rattle for 10 seconds and then it would kind of chill out. I’m pretty used to that.
“But on that day, it started off pretty slow, and then it just gradually got stronger and stronger until the point it was just violently shaking the whole building. I’m eight floors up in this apartment, so obviously the higher you are in a building, the more that you actually feel the shaking.
“The mirrors were banging off the wall, and the plates were rattling in the cupboards and stuff, so it was definitely a scary one for sure. We just had to evacuate the building. I had to literally just run out in my bare feet down eight flights of stairs to get out of the building.”
As Rhys rushed to get outside, the realisation began to sink in that this earthquake was different to what he had become accustomed to.
“Usually, the earthquakes here are a couple of seconds. This one was like a minute or a minute and a half of shaking,” he says.
“I thought the building was going to come down, to be honest, so I ran out.
“The guy across the hall, we both opened our doors at the same time, and we both just kind of looked at each other and just legged it downstairs. Everyone was in a big panic.
“Whenever there’s an earthquake there’s like a city-wide alarm, so that was going off in the background.”
The apartment complex was evacuated and Rhys and others living there faced a tense two-hour wait while the building was inspected for damage.
Fortunately, no one from the complex was hurt and everyone got the all-clear to go back inside.
“Everyone was just a bit on edge for the rest of the day,” says Rhys. “Getting to sleep was pretty tough that night, just worrying about the building.”
Medellín was spared the worst impact of the earthquake, which badly hit the Chocó region, where the epicentre was.
“There are still people that are struggling without power and there’s a lot of rural communities in Colombia that are just getting help now in the last day or two because they’re only reachable by boat,” says Rhys.
“In this city where I am at the minute, it’s pretty chilled out again, things are pretty much back to normal.”
Rhys is grateful that he avoided the worst of the earthquake, and he called his parents soon afterwards to let them know he was safe as news began to spread internationally.
Rhys is planning to return home to see his family in Letterkenny soon, as he hasn’t been back for a visit since Christmas.
He has been living abroad for the past two years, starting off solo travelling in Panama before settling in Colombia.
He enjoys living there, citing the mild weather, good food and friendly people as reasons why he thinks it’s “a class place to live”.
Rhys saw how the locals came together to help each other out after the earthquake.
“They’re very similar to Irish people, I feel like whenever there’s a big thing like that, people do come together pretty quickly,” he says.
“There’s a lot of charity events on, they’re gathering clothes to donate to people in the areas that are most badly affected. It’s definitely a nice place to be.
“Even when I ran out of the building, they saw that I was on my own, and there were people coming up giving me their numbers if I needed anything.”
However, experiencing an earthquake on such a large scale has made him more cautious for the future.
“If you live here, you’re a bit more comfortable with it, but for us in Ireland, we never have to have to deal with anything like that, so it was definitely a bit of a shock,” says Rhys.
“I might stay home for like a month or two and then I’ll probably hit the road again.”