Suddenly, the beach sand rumbled and bounced and shook, and monkeys screamed from the trees without end. It was a few minutes to four on April 22, 1991, and my girlfriend (now wife) and I were on a remote Costa Rican beach just north of the border with Panama, lounging under cloudy, humid skies and starting to think about riding our rented mountain bikes back to the village where we were staying. Less than an hour before, even though such a thing doesn’t exist, I had been thinking this feels like earthquake weather. Then, bam.
It was the tectonic movement of a strike-slip fault. Our section of shoreline was lifted 1.4 meters. A tsunami measuring two meters swept into the hamlet of Puerto Viejo, retreated, then returned and retreated several more times. The earthquake, now known as the Bocas del Toro quake, measured 7.7 magnitude on the Richter scale. We were less than a mile from the epicenter.
Ten thousand people were left homeless. Nearly one hundred thirty were killed.
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