Global Natural Disasters This Week: Colombia’s Deadly Quake, Etna’s Longest Eruption in Decades, and Flooding Spans Three Continents

Tracking major natural disasters, humanitarian impacts, and extreme events around the world

ORBIS WEATHER August 14, 2026

A powerful earthquake that has killed more than 260 people in western Colombia stands as the week’s single deadliest disaster, but it was far from the only crisis unfolding across the globe. Mount Etna is in the midst of its longest continuous eruption since the 1970s, monsoon floodwaters have killed more than 125 people combined in India and Myanmar and displaced well over a million, wildfires continue to burn across Canada and Central Africa, a record-breaking heatwave is straining hospitals across Western Europe, and a late-forming tropical storm is bearing down on Hawaii’s Big Island. Taken together, it has been an unusually active week for natural hazards on nearly every continent.

Earthquakes: Colombia’s deadliest quake in a decade

The week’s gravest disaster struck western Colombia on the morning of August 10, when a magnitude-7.4 earthquake centered a few miles east of the town of San José del Palmar sent buildings collapsing across the country’s Pacific and Andean regions. The Colombian Geological Service called it the largest seismic event recorded in the country this century, with a depth of roughly 103 kilometers. By August 12-13, officials put the confirmed death toll at at least 265, with some later reports citing a toll as high as 281 and warning it would continue to climb; more than 3,500 people were injured, and Colombia’s president said nearly 500 people were officially listed as missing, though civilian-run databases had logged over 4,100 missing individuals. More than 25,800 families were affected nationwide. The hardest-hit cities were Cali — where at least 95 people died in a metropolitan area of 2.2 million — along with Pereira, Manizales and Quibdó; more than 1,500 homes were damaged or destroyed, 86 buildings collapsed, seven airports briefly suspended operations, and a dozen or more health centers and numerous schools were damaged. Colombia’s geological service had recorded 130 aftershocks by midweek. President Abelardo de la Espriella declared a national emergency, and international aid poured in quickly: the United States pledged more than $15 million and deployed roughly 40 urban search-and-rescue personnel, while Mexico flew in military aircraft with supplies and rescue teams, and Venezuela, El Salvador and the European Union offered additional assistance. Rescuers using canine units and thermal-imaging drones continued pulling survivors from rubble days after the quake, including a 32-year-old woman freed after more than 36 hours trapped.

Elsewhere, seismic activity was comparatively minor. A magnitude-5.5 earthquake struck off the coast of El Salvador on August 13, shaking El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua but causing no casualties or damage, according to regional reporting. Remote offshore quakes near the South Sandwich Islands (magnitude 6.0, August 12) and the Kermadec Islands (magnitude 5.6, August 13) were recorded by global seismic monitors but posed no threat to populated areas.

Tropical cyclones and storms: Hawaii braces as a quiet Pacific stirs again

The Western Pacific basin, the subject of a dedicated Orbis Weather typhoon report this week, saw its most damaging system in Typhoon Dolphin, which forced the evacuation of more than a million people in eastern China’s Zhejiang, Shanghai and Fujian regions after making landfall on August 9 with sustained winds near 151 km/h; Typhoon Chan-hom followed with a landfall near Japan’s Ibaraki or Fukushima prefectures on August 11 before dissipating. Both systems have since weakened or dissipated, and the basin entered a comparative lull by midweek.

Attention has instead shifted to the Central and Eastern Pacific. Hurricane Genevieve became the first Category 5 hurricane of 2026 in late July before weakening back to a tropical storm off Mexico’s Pacific coast. More immediately, forecasters issued a hurricane watch for Hawaii’s Big Island on August 13 as Tropical Storm Lala organized roughly 700 miles east-southeast of the islands with sustained winds near 40 mph and a track that could bring it to hurricane strength as it approaches. Forecasters warned of 5 to 10 inches of rain, with isolated totals as high as 20 inches, along with damaging winds, dangerous surf, and the potential for life-threatening flooding and mudslides beginning late in the week. A second system, Tropical Storm Hernan, was churning roughly 1,460 miles west of the southern tip of Baja California with winds near 45 mph but posed no threat to land.

Flooding: monsoon season devastates South and Southeast Asia

Monsoon-driven flooding has been the week’s broadest humanitarian crisis. In India’s northeastern Assam state, the death toll from weeks of flooding along the Brahmaputra River reached 100 by August 10, with more than 700,000 people displaced since the flooding began the previous month and nearly 300,000 forced at some point into government relief camps; many returning residents now face digging out from up to a meter of silt, and the government has begun distributing compensation and rebuilding materials. Across India more broadly, the monsoon has killed more than 100 people since July, with Jammu and Kashmir reporting at least 31 deaths from intense rain, Kerala at least 15 deaths and 7 missing amid 10,000 people sheltering in relief camps, and Jharkhand recording 14 lightning-strike deaths among farm workers; neighboring Sri Lanka has recorded 8 monsoon-flooding deaths of its own.

In Myanmar, flooding tied to emergency water releases from the Thaphan Seik and Sedawgyi dams, compounded by river-embankment failures, has killed at least 25 people and left two missing while affecting nearly 442,000 residents across 17 townships, according to Myanmar’s National Unity Government. Sagaing region has been hit hardest, with 23 deaths, while more than 150,000 people in Mandalay region’s Madaya township and 26,000 in Ngazun have been affected without confirmed fatalities; more than 44,000 acres of farmland are underwater in Ayeyarwady region. In China, the remnants of Typhoon Dolphin dumped heavy rain on Beijing and eastern provinces in the days after landfall, and the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) continued to flag active flood alerts in China as recently as August 13. In the United States, a bout of severe weather spawned tornadoes and flash flooding across the Midwest in the days leading up to this report, with deaths and damage reported, following an earlier round of deadly flash flooding in West Virginia in late July.

Wildfires: Canada’s fire season grinds on as Central Africa’s burning season peaks

Canada remains in the grip of an active wildfire season, with roughly 800 fires burning nationally as of early August. British Columbia’s southern interior has seen the heaviest recent activity, including more than 5,000 people placed under new evacuation orders within a single 24-hour span around the Bradley Creek fire near Okanagan Lake, while roughly 130 active fires in northwestern Ontario prompted the evacuation of close to 1,900 residents. Smoke from these fires has repeatedly pushed air quality to unhealthy levels as far away as Toronto and Vancouver, and has drifted into the United States. GDACS satellite tracking showed Canadian burned areas still expanding as of August 13, alongside large fire footprints — ranging from roughly 10,000 to more than 42,000 hectares — across the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Angola, where seasonal agricultural and land-clearing burning is common this time of year and shows up prominently on satellite fire-detection maps, without the same evacuation-driving intensity seen in Canada.

Volcanic activity: Etna’s longest eruption in half a century

Mount Etna in Sicily entered its seventh consecutive day of eruption on August 13, a duration volcanologists say has not been seen since the late 1970s — a sharp departure from the typical pattern of eruptions lasting a few hours to half a day. Lava fountains at the Voragine crater have sent a continuous ash plume skyward, while multiple vents in the Valle del Bove feed ongoing lava flows. Southerly winds have carried ash as far as Libya, and Catania airport suspended flights through the morning of August 14 because of the hazard to aircraft. Italian officials say lava flows currently pose no danger to inhabited areas, though the eruption has drawn large crowds of visitors, prompting multiple mountain-rescue call-outs for tourists who ventured too close to unstable terrain near active flows.

Extreme heat: a record-breaking wave grips Western Europe

More than 135 million people across Europe were under temperatures exceeding 35°C this week as a prolonged heatwave intensified. West London hit 38.1°C on its hottest day of the year, Paris reached 38°C, and roughly 29 million people in Italy and 25 million in Spain — where central areas topped 37°C — faced heat alerts. Hospitals in the United Kingdom reported a surge in heatstroke cases and staff heat exhaustion amid cooling shortfalls, with Britain’s National Health Service describing mounting strain on emergency services. Scientists and meteorologists have linked the heatwave to a broader summer pattern of drought and wildfire across the continent, including a fire that broke out in England’s New Forest on August 9, and note that Europe remains the world’s fastest-warming continent.

Season in context

This week’s disasters land in the middle of what is shaping up to be an unusually active year across multiple hazard categories at once: a major Western Pacific typhoon season that has already produced a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon in Sinlaku this spring and back-to-back systems striking China and Japan this month; an Eastern Pacific season that produced its first Category 5 hurricane in Genevieve weeks before the traditional September peak; a South Asian monsoon that has proven deadlier than recent years across India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka; and a Northern Hemisphere wildfire and heat season stretching from Western Canada to Central Europe. None of these trends is unusual in isolation, but their simultaneous overlap this week has strained emergency-response capacity in several countries at once.

Residents in affected and at-risk regions — from Colombia’s earthquake-hit interior to Hawaii’s Big Island, flood-prone South and Southeast Asia, wildfire-affected Canada, and heat-stressed Western Europe — are urged to continue following guidance from local civil-protection and meteorological authorities, keep emergency supplies on hand, and avoid unnecessary travel through active hazard zones. Conditions in several of these situations, particularly the Colombia earthquake recovery, Tropical Storm Lala’s approach to Hawaii, and the Etna eruption, remain fluid and are likely to be updated by their respective national agencies in the days ahead.

Sources

This article was compiled by Orbis Weather from publicly available reporting for illustrative branding purposes. It is not an official product of the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, the Japan Meteorological Agency, PAGASA, NOAA, the National Hurricane Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, GDACS, or any other national or international disaster-monitoring agency. For official, up-to-the-minute hazard information, please consult those agencies and your local civil-protection authorities directly.

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