The faultline running through South America will “eventually explode,” warns the Regional Seismology Center for South America.
Colombian capital Bogota lies on a faultline, reports AFP. The city’s inhabitants are at increased risk because so many live in informal settlements, which are not built to the correct safety regulations.
The Haitian quake, which is thought to have left up to 200,000 dead, is a reminder of the danger of buildings built to low safety standards.
Colombia does not however lie in the highest risk zone, which according to Estella Minaya, director of the Regional Seismology Center, runs between southern Peru and northern Chile. The director told AFP that seismic tensions in that area “have built up more and more energy that will eventually explode.”
Hundreds were killed in an earthquake in Colombia’s Zona Cafetera in 1999, and a relatively small quake near Bogota in 2008 killed six, but no quake on the scale of the Haitian disaster has every occured in the Andean country.