Peaceful sunset the day before

I’m in the Pacific beach town of San Juan del Sur, not far from the border to Costa Rica. This morning I was woken up by a fairly strong earthquake. It turned to be a quake of magnitude 7.6 in the North-West of Costa Rica, about 150 km from here (and about 150 km from San José). It turns out that this is the strongest earthquale in Costa Rica since 1991. Everyone in the hostel got up and out of their rooms but there was no damage. The video in this article was taken in La Sabana, San José where I used to live until recently. What I was more concerned about was the chance for a tsunami because my hostel was right at the beach. But the locals didn’t seem to be too concerned. So, I turned to twitter for some real-time updates and learned that indeed a tsunami warning was issued. About 20 min later there was word that the Army is going to evacuate the beach town (ha, even German tabloid Bild got that covered). We packed out stuff but the Army never came. Instead, the Costa Rican authorities canceled their tsunami warnings and eventually a truck with loudspeakers drove through San Juan del Sur letting us know that everything is okay…

USGS website

Update:

The same day we went across the border to Tamarindo, which is near the epicenter in Coste Rica. This is how we found our holiday home: