The death toll from Ecuador’s magnitude-7.8 quake has more than tripled to 233, with hundreds more injured in the worst quake to strike the country in 40 years.
The epicentre of the quake was along the Pacific coast in a sparsely populated region, with Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa naming the towns of Manta and Pedernales the worst affected.
Correa reported the death toll on his official Twitter account while flying back from Rome to deal with the crisis.
Vice President Jorge Glas headed to Manta and Portoviejo on Sunday morning, announcing a state of emergency in six provinces and deploying 10,000 troops to aid rescue efforts and keep order.
Landslides are hampering rescue efforts in the more remote regions, with dozens of roads closed.
Officials said shelters had been set up across the affected region and field hospitals were being deployed in Pedernales and Portoviejo with more than 3,000 packages of food and nearly 8,000 sleeping kits being delivered.
Coastal towns near the epicenter were evacuated as a precautionary measure in case of tsunami waves but several hours later authorities said was safe for coastal residents to return to their homes.
Venezuela and Mexico have both pledged humanitarian aid and the government has released $600 million in emergency funding from multilateral banks to rebuild devastated cities.
David Rothery, a professor of geosciences at The Open University northeast of London said the quake was about six times as strong as the most powerful of two deadly earthquakes across the Pacific, in the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands.
Death toll rises to 233
Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa, returning from a summit in Italy, says the death toll from Saturday night’s quake has more than tripled since the last official announcement - now 233 people.
Our graphics team have put together this map showing the area in the Pacific Ocean basin known as the Ring of Fire, for its significant earthquake and volcanic activity. It’s not actually a ring, it’s a 40,000-kilometre horseshoe of seismic activity.
Also known as the Circum- Pacific belt, around 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur in this region, the next more active is the Alpide belt from the Mediterranean toward Turkey and Iran, which produces 5-6%.
Ecuador sits on the edge between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, the plates which make up the Earth surface. The plates are not fixed, moving on top of a layer of solid and molten rock, known as the Earth’s mantle.
They move at roughly the rate of 65mm a year but the grinding of the plates against each other causes seismic activity, as the Nazca plate under the Pacific ocean slides beneath the land mass of South America (known as subduction).
The activity has led, over many millions of years, to the creation of the Andes mountains amongst other natural wonders as well as some of the most disastrous earthquakes in history.
The Western coast of the US and Canada, as well as South American countries on the Pacific coast are affected by activity in the Ring of Fire, as well as Japan and other Pacific islands like Tonga, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia.
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