Seismologists were not surprised that a large earthquake struck this stretch of coast. They were surprised by when. The Ecuador-Colombia subduction zone had been rupturing in segments since the great 1906 earthquake: off Manabí in 1942, near Esmeraldas in 1958, off Tumaco in 1979. The 1942 segment, near Pedernales, had been locked for seventy-four years by 2016 - right at the characteristic recurrence interval for this patch of fault. The 2016 rupture occurred on almost exactly the same piece of plate boundary, with epicenters only 42 kilometres apart. The slip amounted to several metres in places. Geophysicists now read the 2016 earthquake as a near-exact re-rupture of 1942, which was itself a partial re-rupture of 1906. The cycle is real, and it is running.

Pedernales sits about 35 kilometres south-southwest of the 2016 epicenter. Its mayor, Gabriel Alcivar, told reporters in the hours after the shaking that his town had been leveled. He was not exaggerating much. Hotels collapsed on guests. Concrete apartment blocks pancaked into their ground floors. The central commercial street was rubble. Pedernales in 2016 was a beach-town economy - hotels, seafood restaurants, small shops - serving Ecuadorian tourists who came for the Pacific coast. Many of the dead had been in those businesses when the quake hit on a warm Saturday evening of a holiday weekend. Rescue teams worked through the nights that followed, pulling survivors from pockets in the debris. Some were found days later. Many others were not.

The worst urban damage in a major city occurred in Manta, about 140 kilometres south of the epicenter, in its central commercial district called Tarqui. Tarqui was Manta's shopping district, its restaurant zone, its weekend crowd. When the shaking started, buildings along its narrow streets began to come down almost at once. The district was 'completely destroyed,' according to local reporting. The control tower of Manta's airport was severely damaged; an Air Force officer was injured and the airport closed. More than 300 of the confirmed fatalities came from Manta and nearby Portoviejo, both in Manabí Province. The shaking was felt strongly in Quito, 170 kilometres east across the Andes, and as far away as Cali, Colombia, where a clinic was evacuated as a precaution. In Guayaquil, 300 kilometres from the epicenter, an overpass collapsed on a car and killed the driver.

President Correa mobilized roughly 10,000 military personnel and 3,500 police officers for rescue and recovery. Over 26,000 survivors were displaced to shelters. The Ecuadorian state - already under financial stress from a commodity-price collapse - calculated damages at around $3 billion and took out loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. A national sales-tax increase and higher income taxes on top earners were announced to fund reconstruction. In the harder-hit towns, distribution of food and water was patchy in the first days. Correa himself acknowledged that poor infrastructure had worsened the response. UNICEF reported that the government was considering relocating one or two coastal towns entirely, in places where the ground had proven too unstable to rebuild on. Concerns compounded quickly: the Zika virus was already circulating in Ecuador, and displaced populations in hot, humid shelters were particularly vulnerable to mosquito-borne disease.

Reconstruction dragged. The pace of rebuilding frustrated survivors whose towns had been flattened. Years later, in a story that eventually reached a courtroom, Jorge Glas - Correa's vice president during the earthquake and the official placed in charge of coordinating the reconstruction - was investigated, indicted, and eventually convicted for embezzling public funds linked to the recovery effort. On June 30, 2025, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The 676 dead - the number most often cited, though precise counts varied slightly across agencies - included Ecuadorians overwhelmingly, but also foreign visitors: an Italian businessman, Canadian tourists, an Irish nun who had worked in Ecuador for decades. The earthquake is the largest to strike Ecuador since the 1979 Tumaco event, and the most recent major break in a plate-boundary sequence that began with 1906 and still has segments to release.