The president of the Azores government today pledged to rehabilitate everything destroyed by the 1998 earthquake on the island of Faial, praising the population’s reaction to the disaster that ruined 70 percent of the island’s homes.
“So much that has been done does not dispense with a realistic capacity for what still needs to be done. Of what is not yet complete. Of what we can raise and add for the development of our islands. The Government of the Azores is committed to the progress of our islands and to the rehabilitation of what has been destroyed,” declared José Manuel Bolieiro.
The leader of the Azorean executive (PSD/CDS-PP/PPM) spoke today in Ribeirinha, city of Horta, in the solemn session evocative of the 25 years of the 1998 earthquake.
In the early morning of July 9, 1998, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.9 on the Richter scale destroyed a large part of Faial’s housing stock, causing eight deaths.
José Manuel Bolieiro left a word of “sadness and sorrow” to the victims’ families and praised the Faial people’s ability to react to the catastrophe.
The social-democrat also praised the “capacity to react and to stand by the people” of the then president of the Regional Government, socialist Carlos César.
“We have completed a quarter century of this terrible event that affected us all and that unfortunately was not a unique act, nor the first, nor perhaps the last in the telluric life of our islands in the Azores,” he admitted.
Currently there are still two parish churches destroyed by the earthquake that have not reopened: Pedro Miguel, which has been rebuilt and will be inaugurated later this month, and Ribeirinha.
Twenty-five years after the earthquake of July 9, 1998, which killed eight people and destroyed 70% of the housing stock on the island of Faial, the earth continues to tremble, due to a new seismic crisis.
According to CIVISA, the Seismovulcanic Surveillance and Information Center of the Azores, dozens of earthquakes (some of them felt) have been registered since the beginning of the week, with their epicenter at sea, west of the parish of Capelo, exactly on the opposite side of the great earthquake, which also occurred at sea, only five kilometers from the tip of Ribeirinha, on the east coast.
Twenty-five years after the great Faial earthquake, the earth still shakes