Dave Creary had been in Medellin for two days when the floor started moving. He had arrived on the Saturday for a week-long vacation and was on the 12th storey of a 17-storey hotel on Monday morning when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake tore through western Colombia. "When I got up, the place was just shaking hard. I looked out of my window and saw buildings shaking," he told the Jamaica Gleaner. "It was chaos to get down the stairs from the 12th floor. While we're running down, it kept shaking." He made it out. By the time he spoke to a reporter three days later, the mood around him had not recovered. "The energy and the vibe in the country is low," he said.
Colombia's government put the confirmed death toll at more than 265 as of August 13, with over 3,700 injured and more than 4,100 people still listed as missing. The quake, centred near the town of San Jose del Palmar in Choco Department, damaged more than 8,300 homes, destroyed over 1,100 of them outright, collapsed 48 buildings, and left 796 schools, 84 healthcare centres, and 73 roads in need of repair across 12 departments. It is the strongest earthquake to hit Colombia in a decade, and the shaking reached as far as Bogota, Ecuador, and Panama.
It is also, geologically speaking, not the Caribbean's earthquake. Choco sits on the Nazca plate as it grinds beneath the South American plate, a subduction system on the Pacific side of the continent, hundreds of kilometres from the actual Caribbean Plate. That distinction matters, because it means the real warning in this story is not that the ground moved in Colombia. It is that a Jamaican tourist, with no way to know a hotel's evacuation route ahead of time, found out in real time what it feels like to be caught inside a high-rise when a plate boundary fails, on a plate that is not even his own. Jamaica sits on one that is.
A Plate That Has Killed Before, Closer to Home
The Caribbean Plate runs beneath the sea and land mass that gives the region its name, bounded to the north by a chain of fault systems that most people who live on top of them never think about until the ground moves. The Oriente fault runs under eastern Cuba. The Septentrional fault runs under the Dominican Republic. The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault runs under Haiti and reaches toward Jamaica. The Cayman Trough sits between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Every one of those has produced a significant earthquake within the last twenty years, and two of them have produced some of the deadliest earthquakes anywhere in the world within the last century.
On January 14, 1907, an earthquake measuring 6.2 struck Kingston directly. Somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people died, 10,000 were left homeless, and 85 percent of the city's warehouse and business district was destroyed, first by the shaking and then by the fires that followed. A tsunami up to two metres high hit Jamaica's north coast within hours. On January 12, 2010, an earthquake measuring 7.0 struck near Port-au-Prince, on or near the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system that also runs under Jamaica. Haiti's government put the death toll between 220,000 and 316,000; independent estimates run lower, from 100,000 to about 160,000. By any of those counts, it remains the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century in a single country. On January 28, 2020, a magnitude 7.7 quake ruptured the Cayman Trough between Jamaica and Cuba, the strongest in the Caribbean since 1946, triggering tsunami warnings from Mexico to the Cayman Islands and shaking felt as far away as Miami. It caused no major damage that time. Jamaica's Earthquake Unit still recorded felt tremors of magnitude 3.1 in January 2026 and 3.5 in June, small reminders that the plate has not gone quiet.
The Core Argument
Colombia's earthquake is not on the Caribbean Plate, but it is a preview of what the Caribbean Plate has already done twice in living memory, in Kingston in 1907 and in Port-au-Prince in 2010. Jamaica has real monitoring infrastructure and the Caribbean has real catastrophe insurance. Neither one currently buys a resident, a tourist, or a hospital the ten to twenty seconds of warning that stands between a plate boundary failing and the shaking actually arriving. That gap is where AI belongs.
Jamaica Is Watching Closely. Watching Is Not the Same as Warning
The Earthquake Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is Jamaica's hub for seismic monitoring, and by regional standards it is well equipped. It operates 14 to 15 broadband digital seismographs plus 11 community-level sensors, with six more sites already identified for future installation, spread across Kingston, St Thomas, St Catherine, Clarendon, Portland, St Ann, St James, and Westmoreland. "Jamaica is quite advanced regionally. We are at the stage where we have upwards of 14 to 15 broadband digital seismographs," Earthquake Unit head Kevin Tankoo said in an interview. The network supports fault mapping, hazard-level assessment for specific sites, and a mobile app that shows real-time waveform data as it comes in.
What it was not built to do is issue a warning before the shaking reaches you. That distinction, between recording an earthquake and warning people about one before it arrives, is the entire difference between what Jamaica has today and what Japan, Mexico, and parts of the United States have built. The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management runs its own side of the response, observing an annual Earthquake Awareness Week each January, this year under the theme "Resilient Jamaica: We Weather the Storm and Brace for the Shake," and pointing homeowners toward the National Building Codes under the Building Act, 2018, whenever a house is being built or renovated. Both agencies are doing real, credible work. Neither one, on its own, closes the gap between a fault slipping and a family in Half Way Tree knowing they have even a few seconds to get away from a window.
The Asset the Region Already Has: An Insurance Model, Not a Warning System
The Caribbean's strongest piece of earthquake infrastructure is not a warning system at all. It is CCRIF SPC, formed in 2007 as the world's first multi-country, multi-peril parametric risk pool, now covering earthquake, hurricane, and excess rainfall risk for 19 Caribbean and 3 Central American governments. Its catastrophe model, called SPHERA and last updated in 2019, runs hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and loss modules together, so that once an earthquake crosses a pre-agreed intensity threshold in a member country, a payout triggers automatically, without the months-long claims assessment a conventional insurance policy would require. Since it launched, CCRIF has made 54 payouts totalling 245 million US dollars, reaching more than 3.5 million people across the region.
That is a genuinely sophisticated piece of financial infrastructure, and it exists because the Caribbean, unlike most of the world, decided nearly two decades ago that it could not wait for a slow claims process after a disaster on this scale. But SPHERA answers a different question than the one Dave Creary's stairwell moment raises. It tells a finance ministry how much money is owed after an earthquake has already happened. It says nothing to the person still inside the building while it is shaking.
Where AI Actually Fits
None of what follows requires the Caribbean to build seismic infrastructure from nothing. It requires putting a machine learning layer on top of infrastructure that already exists. The first and most direct application is P-wave detection. Every earthquake sends out a fast, weaker wave first, the P-wave, followed seconds to tens of seconds later by the slower, destructive S-wave that does the damage. Japan's national warning system, operating since 2007, and Mexico's SASMEX network both use this gap, combined with machine learning trained to estimate magnitude and shaking intensity from those first few seconds of data, to issue automated alerts before the strong shaking arrives. California's ShakeAlert system, built on a comparable principle, typically delivers a warning within 4 to 20 seconds of an earthquake's origin, depending on how dense the sensor network is near the epicentre. Jamaica's 14 to 15 broadband seismographs are not as dense as California's network, but they are a real foundation. An AI layer trained on that network, plus the historical record from the 1907, 2010, and 2020 events, could plausibly deliver 10 to 20 seconds of warning to Kingston before shaking from a plate boundary event reaches the city, enough time to drop, cover, and hold on, or to get clear of a window.
The second application is damage assessment. Colombia's response teams are, right now, trying to physically verify the condition of 796 schools, 84 healthcare centres, and thousands of homes across 12 departments, largely by sending people to look. Computer vision models trained on satellite and drone imagery, comparing before-and-after scans of a city, can flag likely building collapse and severe structural damage within hours instead of days, letting rescue and inspection teams prioritise where to go first rather than working through a list in whatever order reports come in. The third is sharpening CCRIF's own model. SPHERA's exposure and vulnerability modules are only as accurate as the building inventory data feeding them. AI-driven analysis of continuously updated satellite imagery, tracking new construction, informal settlement growth, and building condition over time, could tighten that inventory and make payout triggers both faster and more precisely targeted to where the damage actually is.
The fourth application is the one Dave Creary's account makes most vivid. He had no way, arriving in a foreign city two days earlier, to know his hotel's evacuation stairwell or assembly point before the ground started moving. A multilingual AI alert system, integrated into hotel booking platforms, airline apps, and mobile carriers, could push a short, specific message to any traveller in an affected zone within seconds of a detected quake: which stairwell, which direction, which assembly point, in whatever language the traveller's phone is already set to. That is not exotic technology. It is a routing and translation problem sitting on top of the same P-wave detection that would already need to exist for residents.
What a Working Pipeline Would Look Like
Picture the sequence end to end. UWI's Earthquake Unit network detects a P-wave arrival across two or more stations. A machine learning model estimates magnitude and likely shaking intensity within a second or two, well within the lead time the S-wave gives before it arrives. An automated alert fires simultaneously to ODPEM's national broadcast systems, mobile carriers for a cell alert, hotel and resort management systems for guest notification, and hospitals and schools for immediate protective action, all before the strong shaking reaches Kingston, Montego Bay, or wherever the epicentre sits closest to. In the hours after, satellite and drone imagery starts feeding a damage-triage model that flags likely collapse sites for ODPEM and emergency responders, while the same imagery feeds into an updated CCRIF exposure layer that speeds up the payout calculation government finance ministries will need almost immediately. Every piece of that pipeline already has an institutional owner in Jamaica or the wider Caribbean. What is missing is the AI layer connecting the pieces and the seconds of lead time it would buy.
What Should Happen Before the Next One
Four steps would move this from an argument to something built. First, UWI's Earthquake Unit and Jamaica's government should fund a machine learning P-wave detection pilot on the existing 14 to 15 station seismograph network, the same approach already proven in Japan and Mexico, rather than waiting for a denser sensor network that could take years to fund and install. Second, ODPEM should build the automated alert routing from that pilot straight into mobile carriers, schools, hospitals, and the hotel sector, so a warning reaches people through channels they already use rather than through a press release cycle. Third, CCRIF SPC and its regional partners should explore feeding continuously updated satellite building-inventory data into SPHERA's exposure module, sharpening a model that already moves faster than conventional insurance but could move faster and more precisely still. Fourth, Jamaica's hospitality sector, the same sector that Dave Creary's hotel in Medellin belongs to on the Colombian side of this story, should build multilingual evacuation alerting into guest check-in systems before the next visitor finds out the hard way what their hotel's stairwell looks like at magnitude 6 or higher.
None of this waits on new geology or a discovery about how the Caribbean Plate behaves. The fault lines under Kingston, Port-au-Prince, and Santiago de Cuba have been mapped for decades, and 1907 and 2010 already showed what they can do. Colombia's earthquake this month is not the Caribbean's fault system failing. It is a reminder, delivered through one Jamaican's stairwell in a hotel that was never his, of how little warning any of us get when a plate boundary decides to move, and how much of that gap the region could close with technology it is already most of the way to having.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened in Colombia's August 10, 2026 earthquake?
A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck Choco Department in western Colombia at 07:34 local time on August 10, 2026, centred about 20 kilometres from the community of San Jose del Palmar. By August 13, Colombia's president put the confirmed death toll at more than 265, with over 3,700 injured and more than 4,100 people still reported missing. The quake damaged more than 8,300 homes, destroyed over 1,100 of them, collapsed 48 buildings, and affected 796 schools, 84 healthcare centres, and 73 roads across 12 departments, including the cities of Pereira, Cali, Quibdo, Manizales, and Armenia.
Was a Jamaican caught in the earthquake?
Yes. Jamaican traveller Dave Creary had arrived in Medellin two days earlier for a one-week vacation and was on the 12th floor of a 17-storey hotel when the quake hit. He told the Jamaica Gleaner the building was shaking hard when he woke, that it was chaos getting down the stairwell while the tremors continued, and that the mood across the country afterward was subdued. Medellin sits well outside the worst-hit departments, but the shaking reached the city and was felt as far away as Bogota, Ecuador, and Panama.
Is Colombia's earthquake connected to the Caribbean's own earthquake risk?
Not directly, and that distinction matters. The Choco earthquake resulted from strike-slip faulting inside the Nazca plate as it subducts beneath the South American plate, in a zone where the Nazca, South American, and Malpelo plates interact near the Ecuador-Colombia trench. That is a different tectonic system from the actual Caribbean Plate, which runs beneath Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the Cayman Trough. Colombia's quake is a reminder of how suddenly a plate boundary can fail, not a sign that the Caribbean Plate itself moved.
What is the Caribbean Plate, and which countries sit on it?
The Caribbean Plate is a tectonic plate roughly the size of the Caribbean Sea itself, bounded on its northern edge by fault systems including the Oriente fault under eastern Cuba, the Septentrional fault under the Dominican Republic, the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault under Haiti and Jamaica, and the Cayman Trough between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago all sit on or near its edges, which is why earthquake risk in the Caribbean is a shared, structural fact rather than an occasional surprise.
Has Jamaica had a major earthquake before?
Yes. The 1907 Kingston earthquake, magnitude 6.2, killed an estimated 800 to 1,000 people, left 10,000 homeless, and destroyed 85 percent of Kingston's warehouse and business district, followed by a tsunami on the north coast. On January 28, 2020, a magnitude 7.7 quake in the Cayman Trough between Jamaica and Cuba, the strongest in the Caribbean since 1946, triggered tsunami warnings across the region and was felt as far as Miami, though it caused no major damage. In 2026 alone, Jamaica's Earthquake Unit recorded felt tremors of magnitude 3.1 in January and 3.5 in June.
How does Jamaica currently monitor earthquakes?
The Earthquake Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, runs Jamaica's seismic monitoring, operating 14 to 15 broadband digital seismographs plus 11 community-level sensors, with 6 more sites already identified for future installation, across Kingston, St Thomas, St Catherine, Clarendon, Portland, St Ann, St James, and Westmoreland. Unit head Kevin Tankoo has described Jamaica as advanced regionally on this front. The network records and analyses ground motion after the fact and supports hazard mapping, but it was not built to issue a seconds-level warning before shaking arrives.
What is CCRIF SPC and how does its earthquake insurance work?
CCRIF SPC, formed in 2007 as the world's first multi-country, multi-peril parametric risk pool, provides earthquake, hurricane, and excess rainfall insurance to 19 Caribbean and 3 Central American governments. Its SPHERA catastrophe model, updated in 2019, combines hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and loss modules to trigger payouts automatically once an earthquake crosses a pre-agreed intensity threshold, without the lengthy claims assessment a conventional insurance policy requires. Since its founding, CCRIF has made 54 payouts totalling 245 million US dollars, benefiting more than 3.5 million people across the region.
How could AI improve the Caribbean's earthquake early warning?
AI would not need a new sensor network from scratch. Machine learning models trained to detect the fast, weaker P-wave that arrives before the destructive S-wave, the same approach behind Japan's national warning system and Mexico's SASMEX, could run on top of Jamaica's existing 14 to 15 broadband seismographs and issue automated alerts in the range of 10 to 20 seconds before strong shaking reaches Kingston, roughly what California's ShakeAlert system delivers on comparable station density. AI-based computer vision applied to satellite and drone imagery could also triage building damage within hours of an event rather than days, and machine learning could sharpen CCRIF's exposure and vulnerability modules so payouts trigger faster and more accurately.
What should someone in Jamaica or a Jamaican traveling abroad do to prepare for an earthquake?
Jamaica's Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management advises households to have new or renovated buildings engineered and constructed to the National Building Codes under the Building Act, 2018, to know their nearest safe evacuation points, and to keep an emergency kit with water, a torch, and important documents ready year-round, not only during the Unit's annual Earthquake Awareness Week each January. Travellers, as Dave Creary's experience in Medellin showed, should identify a hotel's evacuation stairwell and assembly point on arrival, since in a strong quake there is no time to work that out once the shaking starts.
Could the Caribbean export an AI earthquake early-warning system it builds?
Potentially, yes. The Caribbean already runs two pieces of infrastructure most seismically exposed regions do not have paired together: a functioning multi-decade sensor and research network at UWI's Earthquake Unit, and CCRIF SPC's SPHERA catastrophe model, the first parametric risk pool of its kind in the world when it launched in 2007. An AI early-warning and damage-triage layer built on top of both, tested against Jamaica's own plate boundary risk, would be a genuine capability the region could license or advise other small island and coastal states on, rather than a system built once and left as a local tool.