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 two university campuses, all 7 badly damaged buildings with a documented date were built before 1999.
Universidad Nacional rated every building on its Manizales and Palmira campuses (–). Buildings are grouped by independently documented construction or opening dates, not by the dataset's own year field, which is wrong or unconfirmed for 9 of the 29 buildings. Colombia's NSR-98 seismic code took effect in 1998. The sample is small and selected, several older buildings had been strengthened and several newer ones only have design records, so this does not show whether the code was followed.
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
Both cities found many schools unsafe or restricted, but their ratings can't be ranked against each other.
Share of inspected schools by safety rating. Armenia rated individual school buildings and Pereira rated whole institutions, from different lists and with different categories, so the two panels show each city's own result rather than which city did better.
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
On two university campuses, every badly damaged building with a documented date predated 1999. The buildings that collapsed in Cali and Pereira haven't been documented the same way.
Walls, ceilings and parapets
Many buildings whose main structure stayed up were still closed because parapets, ceilings, walls or façades fell.
Closures
Far more university buildings were closed or restricted than were badly damaged.