A Century After the Faial Earthquake Brought Down 4,138 Houses, the Horta Museum Is Marking It With an Evacuation Drill for a Hundred Children

At 8.42 in the morning on 31 August 1926, the ground under the channel separating Faial from Pico moved hard enough to bring down more than four thousand buildings on an island of roughly twenty thousand people. Nine died and more than two hundred were injured. On Monday the Museu da Horta (Horta Museum) marks the centenary, and it is doing so with a hundred children and an earthquake drill rather than a wreath.

The quake is estimated at magnitude 5.3 to 5.9 on the Richter scale, with a maximum intensity of grade X on the Mercalli scale, the point at which masonry buildings are destroyed outright. The modest magnitude and the severe intensity are not a contradiction: the epicentre sat in the Faial to Pico channel, shallow and close, under towns built of stone laid without reinforcement.

It did not arrive without warning. "The first event was on 5 April and already had a considerable degree of destruction," said Rita Dias, a senior technician at the Horta Museum, describing a seismic crisis that ran through the spring and summer before culminating on 31 August in what she called the largest earthquake in the island's memory.

Four thousand one hundred and thirty-eight houses

The damage figure is precise because the district's public works service counted it: 4,138 dwellings, alongside convents and churches. The worst-hit parishes were Conceição, Flamengos, Ribeirinha and Praia do Almoxarife. In the city of Horta the Convento de Santo António and the Igreja da Conceição collapsed, the Convento e Igreja do Carmo were badly damaged, and so was the old Jesuit college that today houses the museum itself.

Rebuilding the island was costed at around 91,000 contos, the conto being a thousand escudos and, in 1926, a serious sum. Neither the civil governor nor Horta's town council could meet it. "Faced with this situation, General Carmona's government took on responsibility for the victims," said historian Carlos Lobão, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the island's twentieth-century earthquakes. An initial 500 contos was followed by 2,000 more for housing the displaced, who had first been put into tents. Two navy ships, the Carvalho Araújo and the Adamastor, arrived at Horta with food, clothing and canvas.

Horta was not a backwater at the time. The port was a coaling and provisioning stop for Atlantic shipping and a hub for submarine telegraph cable companies, which gave a rural island of smallholders an unusually cosmopolitan edge. The island has fewer than fifteen thousand residents today.

The question the historian is still asking

Faial was shaken again in 1973 and, most destructively, in 1998. Lobão's observation is that the damage keeps landing in the same places. "In 1998, in the whole area of the Flamengos bridge, all those houses were destroyed, and they had been rebuilt following the 1973 earthquake," he said, asking whether the reconstruction was ever properly supervised. It is a pointed question for an archipelago that rebuilds after every cycle, and it echoes the call by Portugal's doctors this month for a national earthquake-resilience audit and regular drills.

Hence Monday's programme. At the Casa Manuel de Arriaga, the museum and the Faial volunteer fire brigade will run an awareness session and a simulated earthquake for children from the island's holiday clubs, with about a hundred already signed up. "It is something that is part of our condition as islanders, but it is very important: knowing how to act in the event of an earthquake," Dias said. The museum is also publishing a photographic archive of the destruction on its website through the centenary.

What this means for residents in the Azores

• Seismicity here is a permanent condition, not an event. Faial sits in the Azores triple junction region, where three tectonic plates meet. The channel that produced the 1926 quake is the same one where CIVISA raised the volcanic alert to V1 in May.
• Intensity matters more than magnitude for your house. A shallow offshore 5.5 can do more to unreinforced masonry than a distant larger quake. Building age and construction method are the variables you can actually check before you buy or rent.
• Drills are the point. The museum is running one for children because household response in the first thirty seconds is the part of earthquake risk that residents control.

Faial's contemporary architecture is, in a real sense, the product of 31 August 1926: what fell was not rebuilt as it had been. A century on, the island is marking the anniversary by teaching the next generation what to do when the channel moves again, which on the geological record it will.