Magnitude 7.7. Then magnitude 6.6. Two earthquakes hit southern Panama on Friday, October 9, 2026, and the first one struck at 12:56 pm local time at a depth of 10 kilometers (6 miles), according to the USGS. Buildings and roads collapsed in the center of the country. Nobody was reported killed in the first hours, which is the figure that matters most.
The USGS first reported the main quake as magnitude 8, revised it to 7.6, and settled on 7.7. Its epicenter was about 10 kilometers southwest of Pitaloza Arriba, a remote community in Herrera province. People felt it as far away as Colombia.
Where the damage was
President José Raúl Mulino said, “We are facing a major disaster,” and noted that some roads had “completely collapsed.” He travelled to Penonomé to coordinate the response. The worst-hit areas, according to Health Minister Fernando Boyd, were Herrera, Cocle and Los Santos provinces. The town of Tonosí in Los Santos was completely cut off. “We are trying to figure out how to get there by air, because it’s impossible by land,” Boyd said.
In Penonomé, about 150 km (93 miles) from the capital, the cathedral in the main square partly collapsed and cracked. The governor’s office building and the Dos Continentes hotel were damaged. Two people were reported injured, trapped in collapsed structures: one near a church in Veraguas, the other in a hotel in Cocle. Local outlets reported that the Church of San Atanasio, a colonial-style Catholic church in Los Santos declared a National Historic Heritage Site in 1938, had collapsed.
Panama City, about 200 kilometers from the epicenter, avoided reported damage, but people rushed out of skyscrapers. “I was scared because the shaking was very strong and prolonged,” said Salomon Andion, 46, who left his 15-story building a second time after aftershocks.
Aftershocks and the sea
Aftershocks kept coming. Several measured magnitude 5.8, 5.5 and 5.2, and the local geosciences institute counted more than 80, one above magnitude 6.0. A tsunami warning for the coasts of Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Guatemala was lifted later in the day. Néstor Luque of the University of Panama’s Geosciences Institute expected waves of 3 to 10 feet (1 and 3 meters) around Isla Cañas and the southern coast of Los Santos, and seawater had already reached homes near the coast on Isla Cañas.
Tocumen International Airport suspended operations after the first quake, then reopened that afternoon. The Panama Canal Authority said shipping was unaffected. The education ministry suspended classes nationwide.
Why Panama shakes, and why the toll was lower
Quakes here come from the interaction of several tectonic plates, including the Cocos, Nazca and Caribbean plates. Panama lies on the “Ring of Fire,” a 40,000-kilometer (25,000-mile) arc of volcanoes and fault lines around the Pacific Basin. AFP described quakes in Panama as rare, usually striking in western Chiriquí province, on the Costa Rican border. The last to cause widespread damage was in 1991, a magnitude 7.4 quake centered in Costa Rica that killed 23 people and injured 559.
This is at least the fourth quake above magnitude 7.0 in Latin America this year, AFP noted. Back-to-back 7.2 and 7.5 quakes in Venezuela’s La Guaira state in June killed more than 6,500 people, and a 7.4 quake in Colombia in August killed at least 289. Carlos Valdés of the National Autonomous University of Mexico said Panama’s lesser toll may reflect strict building codes, especially for skyscrapers in the capital.
Mulino said that evening that authorities had not documented any deaths, though he cautioned that could change. “Nobody was ready, and no one is ever ready for this type of disaster,” he said.
Sources
- Two powerful earthquakes and multiple aftershocks rock Panama (Associated Press via CityNews)
- Powerful 7.7 quake hits Panama, collapsing buildings and roads (AFP via Kuwait Times)
