A 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck near western Cuba on Monday afternoon, shaking buildings in Havana and Florida as far north as Orlando. No injuries or damage was reported.
The quake struck at a depth of 26 kilometers (16 miles) in waters just west of the capital, according to the US Geological Survey.
Flavia Pupo, a manager at the Pinar del Rio hotel in western Cuba, described how the building shook and caused some fear. “Everyone here is OK,” she said by telephone. “The people on the street are a little bit scared.”
Shaking was reported around southwestern Florida, the National Weather Service in Miami said in a tweet. A flood of social media posts indicated people felt shaking even north of Orlando.
Maria Moncayo, who works at a law office in downtown Fort Lauderdale, said she had been quietly working at her desk when she started to feel a vibrating sensation. She compared it to someone doing construction in another part of the building, and it lasted about a minute or so.
“I have a little pendant dangling in my desk, and it was moving,” Moncayo said. “That’s why I realized that it’s actually not me or my chair or anything.”
Moncayo said she had experienced several earthquakes while living in Ecuador, including a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that left hundreds dead in 2016. But she hadn’t experienced one since moving to Florida seven years ago.
“Since I moved here, it kind of left my mind, but when I felt my desk moving, I thought it was going to be like Ecuador,” Moncayo said. “It kind of gave me flashbacks, but then I realized that it’s not bad, it’s just a little one.”
Miami-Dade County officials said they were evacuating several buildings as a precaution, including the county’s main government office building, a 28-story high rise in downtown Miami.
Service for two elevated commuter trains that run through downtown was also suspended temporarily.
William Barnhart, a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey, described Monday’s earthquake as extremely rare. It’s the largest earthquake ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico with modern instruments, which date to the 1950s.
“It’s one of only five or six earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater that we’re aware of in the entire Gulf.”
No tsunami was created by this earthquake. Barnhart pointed out that the destructive ocean waves created by earthquakes and other underwater disturbances are more common in the Pacific Ocean, but they can occur in the Atlantic. Western Cuba might experience some strong aftershocks, but they’re unlikely to be felt in Florida, Barnhart said.
“There’s always a very, very small chance that this could be followed by a larger earthquake and people would feel that,” Barnhart said. “But in Florida, people shouldn’t expect to feel very much shaking, if any shaking at all, from any aftershocks that happen.”
The Oriente fault zone is just off Cuba’s southeast coast and has unleashed damaging earthquakes in recent centuries, including a 7.7 magnitude quake in January 2020 in open waters that caused damage in Cuba and the Cayman Islands.
