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Was on the 6th floor of a tower. Shaking lasted almost 2 minutes. There was no damage as far as I could tell (Medellín) but they still evacuated everyone to inspect the building. City is in a bit of chaos, people are fine but unsettled, and the comms lines are clogged with people presumably calling their families.

Was a bit tense to see my phone alerts going off over and over, continually increasing the estimate of the earthquake strength, followed by the shaking getting worse.

For people who don't know, those phone alerts give you literally like 5 seconds of heads up. By the time I finished reading the first message, the shaking had already started. And I got the message while I was holding my phone and using it.

Here's what it sounds like on Android https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HQe8e3voRdw

IDK why it's so much more chill than the "child abduction" alerts I get. Those are straight up adrenaline-inducing so I've disabled them.

> IDK why it's so much more chill than the "child abduction" alerts I get.

Japan, who had the first earthquake early warning system, did research and discovered that scary sounds made people panic, which is a bad thing in a situation when you need people to act quickly. Their standard alert sound is a fairly pleasant chime.

The downside is that some people now have panic reactions to the EEW sound, since it is standardized. I guess sometimes you can't win.

If you look up the sound, don't play it if you are in Japan. That's extremely no bueno.

I regularly get "adult missing" alerts in Los Angeles, often with no more content than that. Absolutely useless. I can't think of any reason they send those out other than abject brain damaged incompetence or priming for some false flag.
Checkout the Japanese ones for iPhone. I worked at a startup once and a tester was in a room with 30 phones and they all want off at once during a quake. The sound of the apocalypse right there.
As someone living somewhere with a high chance of receiving a natural disaster warning I hate the AMBER alerts. How am I supposed to know if I need to evacuate immediately or just need to look for a car last seen three hundred miles away?

It's not even like the children's lives are in actual danger. Most of these alerts seem to be about custody disputes, in the vein of the kid went to his daddy's place for the weekend and hasn't been back by Monday 7am.

That's unavoidable. We now have shake alerts in CA but if the quake happens on the Hayward fault across the bay San Francisco isn't going to get much warning no matter what anyone does. By best estimates we may get 15s of warning.
15s is enough to book it to a close stairwell in some cases. I used to work in a dodgy building in the city. Any time one of those shake alerts hit, I would sprint to the stairwell and everyone would look at me funny. Jokes on them when the big one hits!
Nice, 15s to move from underneath an unstable object or understand why the freeway is collapsing
The heads up is enough to read the message but not enough to decide if you need to act on it or not. Before you can process it the shaking starts.
The phone alerts sound quite dystopian and unsettling. As if the earth shaking and feeling of imminent doom wasn’t chaotic enough, now you have yet another element of annoyance and distress added to the mix as a cherry on top. Just enough of a distraction in a life/death situation to tilt the scales in a negative direction.
Whenever I want to follow what's happening with a natural disaster like this, where many friends and family are potentially affected, I always use the Wikipedia page, which tends to have the most up-to-date information very quickly. It helps me avoid zooming in on the news and seeing rehashed articles posted on multiple websites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Colombia_earthquake

Didn't feel it but apparently it lasted several minutes and there was a lot of panic here in Bogota. Could see lots of people going out of their apartments in pijamas.

Also TIL that in 2023, while in a smaller earthquake webcam streamers (adult entretainers) went out of their apartments in lingerie.

Same here in Medellin. I can't imagine how it felt at San José
The national paper has a bunch of articles above the fold: https://www.eltiempo.com . 20+ confirmed dead in Pereira, a third-tier city with population of ~500,000. Many wounded.
Thankfully, it's a fairly deep (>100km) subduction zone earthquake. That means less immediate damage from ground acceleration than it could be from an earthquake of that size. However, a very large area may have seen significant liquefaction of soils in valleys and landslides on steep slopes. I'd wager we won't hear about most of the damage initially in the press.
I have family in this area in Valle del Cauca. We've heard from my immediate family and they're okay, but communication is spotty and we don't have a great sense of how bad things are yet. We fly into Matecaña International Airport in Pereira and it looks like the terminal had major damage and at least a few deaths. Shocking and horrifying stuff.
Really curious if it's related somehow to the Venezuela one. Interestingly, New Zealand also experienced a well above average frequency of shakes recently, although the scientist don't see any relation yet.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/successive-m5-plus-earthquakes...

My bed was shaking. I thought the guy in the other room had rough sex. Just realized when I got up, based on the warning message on my phone, that it was an earthquake.
I mean, it happens when you are half asleep. Later I realized that this would have been impossible with a prestressed concrete ceiling/floor.
Statistical anomaly detected: this morning I woke up from an earth quake in my dream. It was powerful enough to really sway the buildings and room I was in. Im in Texas though, but >= 7.0 earthquakes only happen a handful of times a year.

e: first time I dreamed of an earthquake

Magnitude 7.x earthquakes happen 1-2 times per month.
when was this? USGS shows no earthquake in Texas. Are you trying to say that Texas as >= 7.0 earthquakes a handful of times a year? According to wiki[0], Texas has never had anything close to a 7.0

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Texas

once while visiting Peru, I had a vivid memorable dream that my cat was jumping on the bed. woke up to learn that I'd slept through an earthquake.
I hope in my lifetime we discover a way to predict earthquakes better, the danger to life from them would be significantly less if there was sufficient notification.

We can alert for storms, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons, and even somewhat extraterrestrial disasters like asteroids.

The earth itself must move in predictable patterns similar to the weather, and I'm sure there is decades of research around this I'll never even approach to understanding. Just surprising to have such a big knowledge gap that affects humanity year round

We are actually pretty good at predicting the long term for specific regions. This allows building codes to be based on the seismic activity of the region. Sadly this isn't something that's practical in many parts of the world
Even if it's predictable the opaqueness of the earth crust makes predictive models hard
I fear that we can only predict them if we deliberately trigger them to release the energy.
A few days ago, Egypt experienced its most violent earthquake in a long time. It occurred near the Suez Canal and lasted for about 30 seconds. It was absolutely terrifying.
In Bogotá I was asleep and a bunch of random alarms from other buildings woke me up. Didn't notice any shaking but the ceiling was making noises.
Lived it from my 20th floor apartment in Medellin. It was scary af, my wife started crying, but friends and family are OK.

Interesting tech fact: A friend of mine who lives in SF couldn't communicate with his parents who were in the countryside near Pereira (one of the 2 or 3 most devastated cities) because comms were pretty bad, but luckily they had Starlink to be able communicate.

Some technical background on the underlying siesmicity and causes can be found on the excellent Earthquake Insights blog

https://earthquakeinsights.substack.com/p/deadly-m74-earthqu...

Twitter has videos of people getting crushed (probably dead) by falling facade as they try to exit the building. I guess it's still considered smart to try to exit your building in a quake? Maybe it depends on the building.
Is this related to the one in Venezuela earlier this year?
This is the other side of the continent (Pacific Coast).
Was pretty intense. Buildings and windows shaking.
venezuela and now this...
seems there is a lot of activity in south america
Venezuela and now this.... .
Is there something like a domino theory for earth quakes? Like first some stress releases in Venezuella, then the same stress travells further up the boundary, triggering a earth quake in a different region? Working its way up the plate boundary towards a big one like a fuse?
Yes, the seismic waves that are from one earthquake can absolutely give an extra oomph to a fault line that's somewhere else.
Colombia has been doing some rocking and rolling lately.
Colombia*
I read the title as 5 km S of San Jose (as in bay area) at first
There's dozens of cities and towns named San José globally.
Did you? Fascinating.