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We still live up here in Sudbury, Ontario Canada where this morning we woke up to a new batch of fresh awful snow and one of my main conversations with my wife and 2 daughters has been about the weather in Costa Rica, what happened last night? We were watching the local news and much to our surprise including mine there are a number of students from Sudbury and surrounding cities heading to Sarchia (may be spelling it wrong) to help re-build the school that has been somewhat ravished by tropical storms and earthquakes, earthquakes my girls said, I had no answer because outside of the positive weather I did not look into anything else until last night. My daughters have now turned into geological forecasters and weather girls. In the meantime I will continue my internet fact findings and share all of my information with my family, and all comments on here are read around the dinner table so please comment on any experiences weather related you may have. Thank You
costa rica is sandwiched between two oceans. we always have weather. also we are on the ring of fire, and there are over 200 volcanos in costa rica, so we always have tremors, some big some small. in the 6 years i’ve lived here there were two very bad quakes — one wiped out the highway near Parrita, the other took out a mountainside near Poas. i don’t live on an active faultline but i feel a tremor about every month or so. my house is built like a steel birdcage, so it just sways back and forth, and sometimes i get hairline cracks in the wall. earthquakes, severe weather (espcially during the rainy season) are part of life here. september and october are the worst months for the rain. last year entire mountainsides came down, wiping out small enclaves of houses. highways also get destroyed with a landslide — or derrumbe — occurs. there is often a lot of flooding in some areas as well. but you learn to live around the weather. in the rainy season you get out early, get your errands done, and get hoome before the rain starts. there is no place on earth where there is no weather. costa rica is no exception. i hate the earthquakes though — especially after going through the Big One in Alaska, and a few building crushers in LA. Oh well.
My wife and I have been here for three years having come from California. We researched where we wanted to be for six years and concentrated on Costa Rica for three years.
We live on the opposite side of the Central Valley from Maravilla about 20 miles from the central mountain chain and the nearest volcano.
It is a very rare earthquake that reaches 6.5 and the frequency of earthquakes tends to prevent a large devastating earthquake. Most earthquakes are not even felt if you are moving about.
Using Google Earth you can find the location of the volcanoes and earthquakes on the left side of the window under gallery.
Most important in selecting where you want to live is avoiding river bottoms and very steep hillsides. Those are the ares where earthquakes and flooding cause the greatest damage.
also, i think there is a USGS map that will tell you where the faultlines are. someone sent that to me when i was thinking of buying my lot and there were no faultlines in my immediate area. but 5 miles as a crow flies, it’s a different story.
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