10 August 2026 · Magnitude 7.4 · Western Colombia
Shaking intensity and homes lost, by municipality.
Colour shows the share of each municipality's homes registered as destroyed or unsafe to live in. Blue lines show shaking intensity. Select a municipality for details, or zoom into a city to see buildings mapped as damaged from satellite imagery.
Shaking intensity (Modified Mercalli scale): 5 felt by everyone; objects fall from shelves 6 furniture moves; weak buildings crack 7 considerable damage to poorly built buildings
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Homes lost: registered as destroyed or unsafe to live in, as a share of all homes. Sources: Servicio Geológico Colombiano (intensity), UNGRD disaster register, 12 September (damage), DANE 2026 estimate (homes), Copernicus EMSR916 (satellite), geoBoundaries CC BY 4.0 (boundaries).
Intensity vs damage
Damage rose with shaking intensity, but varied widely between municipalities at the same intensity.
Building age
On the same campuses, at similar intensity, buildings from before 1999 were more often badly damaged.
Universidad Nacional rated every building on its Manizales and Palmira campuses (–). Buildings are grouped by construction year, before and after Colombia's 1998 seismic code (NSR-98). Sample: 29 buildings with a known construction year.
Damage vs closures
University buildings closed or restricted vs badly damaged
All university buildings with published ratings: UTP Pereira and four Universidad Nacional campuses.
Armenia · 2,419 buildings inspected
In Armenia, 24% of inspected buildings were tagged unsafe.
Each dot is one building inspected after damage was reported. Green: safe to use. Yellow: restricted use. Red: unsafe. Buildings without reported damage were not inspected.
By building use
Schools and health buildings were tagged unsafe less often than inspected buildings overall.
Share of inspected buildings by tag.
Schools · Armenia and Pereira
Pereira had a smaller share of schools rated safe than Armenia, despite slightly lower intensity.
Share of inspected schools by safety rating. The two cities inspected different lists of schools, so the comparison is approximate.
School buildings
Schools
Each square is 1% of inspected schools. Pereira's lowest rating, “at risk of collapse”, is similar to but not the same as Armenia's red tag.
Failure types
How buildings failed
Each failure type is illustrated with documented cases. The cases show how failures occur, not how often.
Case studies
13 documented buildings
Selected for the quality of their documentation, not as a representative sample.
Data
All figures
Each figure links to its source.
Implications
What the data suggest
Older buildings
At similar intensity, buildings from before the 1998 code were more often badly damaged.
Walls, ceilings and parapets
Unsafe tags far outnumbered total collapses, pointing to hazards other than the main structure.
Closures
Far more university buildings were closed or restricted than were badly damaged.