Puerto Ricans left homeless after biggest quake in century

Hundreds of families who lost their homes in southwest Puerto Rico as a flurry of earthquakes struck the island, sought shelter in a makeshift tent camp on Wednesday.

The strongest of the quakes, of magnitude 6.4, struck before dawn on Tuesday and killed one person, injured nine others and knocked out power across the US territory.

More than 250,000 Puerto Ricans remained without water on Wednesday and another half a million without power, which also affected telecommunications.

Another strong aftershock of a 4.7-magnitude struck on Wednesday near the island's southern coast at the same shallow depth as Tuesday's earthquake.

No serious damage was immediately reported.

More than 2,000 people were staying in government shelters in the island's southwest region as US President Donald Trump declared an emergency and Puerto Rico Governor Wanda Vázquez activated the National Guard.

The hardest hit municipality was the southwest coastal town of Guánica.

While officials said it was too early to estimate the total damage caused by the string of quakes that began the night of December 28, they said hundreds of homes and businesses in the southwest region were damaged or destroyed.

Just in Guánica, a town of roughly 15,000 people, nearly 150 homes were affected by the quake, along with three schools, including one three-story structure whose first two floors were completely flattened.

Tuesday's quake was the strongest to hit Puerto Rico since October 1918, when a magnitude 7.3 quake struck near the island's northwest coast, unleashing a tsunami and killing 116 people.