Mexico Earthquake, Strongest in a Century, Kills Dozens - The New ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/world/americas/mexico-earthquake.html?mcubz...
4 mins ago - Over all, the earthquake — the most powerful to hit the country in a century — killed at least 58 people in Mexico, all of them in the southern part ...Giant Earthquake Shakes Mexico
The country was struck by an
8.2-magnitude quake, the strongest in decades, killing at least 58
people and leveling areas in some southern states.
By CAMILLA SCHICK on Publish Date September 8, 2017.
Photo by Luis Alberto Cruz/Associated Press.
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JUCHITÁN
DE ZARAGOZA, Mexico — Thousands of homes in this city were severely
damaged. Half of the 19th-century city hall, with its 30 arches,
collapsed. The main hospital here was so devastated that staff members
evacuated patients to an empty lot and worked by the light of their
cellphones.
By the time the earthquake’s tremors finally faded, at least 36 people in Juchitán de Zaragoza were dead.
“It’s
a truly critical situation,” Óscar Cruz López, the city’s municipal
secretary, said Friday. “The city,” he said, and then paused. “It’s as
if it had been bombed.”
Over
all, the earthquake — the most powerful to hit the country in a century
— killed at least 58 people in Mexico, all of them in the southern part
of the country that was closer to the quake’s epicenter off the Pacific
Coast.
The
earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.2 and struck shortly before
midnight on Thursday, was felt by tens of millions of people in Mexico
and in Guatemala, where at least one person died as well.
In
Mexico City, the capital, which still bears the physical and
psychological scars of a devastating earthquake in 1985 that killed as
many as 10,000 people, alarms sounding over loudspeakers spurred
residents to flee into the streets in their pajamas.
The
city seemed to convulse in terrifying waves, making street lamps and
the Angel of Independence monument, the capital’s signature landmark,
sway like a metronome’s pendulum.
But
this time, the megalopolis emerged largely unscathed, with minor
structural damage and only two of its nearly nine million people
reporting injuries, neither serious, officials said.
In
the southern part of the country, however, at least 10 people died in
Chiapas State and three died in neighboring Tabasco, including two
children: one when a wall collapsed and the other after a respirator
lost power in a hospital, officials said.
Chiapas officials said that more than 400 houses had been destroyed and about 1,700 others were damaged.
In Oaxaca State, at least 45 people were killed, including the 36 in here in Juchitán, a provincial city of 100,000.
“A
total disaster,” the mayor, Gloria Sánchez López, declared in a
telephone interview in which she appealed for help. “Don’t leave us
alone.”
President
Enrique Peña Nieto flew to the region on Friday afternoon to assess the
damage. And several leaders in Latin America and elsewhere offered
assistance to Mexico, including the presidents of Colombia, Chile,
Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Spain.
Mexico
is also facing the additional threat of Hurricane Katia, which is
gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico and expected to make landfall
in Veracruz State early Saturday.
“You can count on us,” President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia said on Twitter.
Residents
in Juchitán spent the morning using backhoes and their bare hands to
dig through the wreckage of collapsed buildings and pull the injured,
and the dead, from the rubble.
By
early afternoon, the efforts had mostly turned from rescues to a
cleanup operation, though the municipal secretary, Mr. Cruz, said that
workers were still trying to claw through the mounds of debris left by
the collapse of the city hall to reach one last victim, a police
officer. Nobody knew if he was still alive.
“It
is a nightmare we weren’t prepared for,” said a member of the City
Council, Pamela Teran, in an interview with a local radio station. She
estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the houses in the city were
destroyed.
“A lot of people have lost everything, and it just breaks your heart,” she added, bursting into tears.
With
the hospital — the region’s main medical center — destroyed, officials
converted a grade school into a makeshift clinic and moved the
hospital’s patients and the hundreds of injured survivors there.
Local officials appealed to state and federal governments for aid to help with the recovery.
“It’s impossible to resolve this catastrophe, to respond to something of this magnitude, by ourselves,” Mr. Cruz said.
Aftershocks
continued through the day Friday, unnerving the city’s residents, many
of whom spent much of the day out in the street rather than return to
their homes, said Juan Antonio García, the director of the Juchitán news
website Cortamortaja.
Reports
of damage elsewhere in the region continued to emerge throughout the
afternoon. In Union Hidalgo, just to the east of Juchitán, the mayor
reported that about 500 houses had been destroyed.
Schools
in at least 10 Mexican states and in Mexico City were closed on Friday
as the president ordered an assessment of the damage nationwide.
“We
are assessing the damage, which will probably take hours, if not days,”
President Peña Nieto said in televised comments to the nation two hours
after the quake.
Throughout
the day Mexicans lined up at emergency collection centers around the
country to donate food, water and other supplies for delivery to the
earthquake victims.
Mexico is situated near the colliding boundaries of several sections of the earth’s crust.
The
quake on Thursday was more powerful than the one in 1985 that flattened
or seriously damaged thousands of buildings in Mexico City.
While
the quake on Thursday struck nearly 450 miles from the capital, off the
coast of Chiapas State, the one in 1985 was much closer to the capital,
so the shaking proved much more deadly.
After
the 1985 disaster, construction codes were reviewed and stiffened.
Today, Mexico’s construction laws are considered as strict as those in
the United States or Japan.
Though
many Mexicans have grown accustomed to earthquakes, taking them as an
immutable fact of life, Thursday’s quake left a lasting impression on
residents of the capital for both its force and duration.
“The
scariest part of it all is that if you are an adult, and you’ve lived
in this city your adult life, you remember 1985 very vividly,” said
Alberto Briseño, a 58-year-old bar manager. “This felt as strong and as
bad.”
“Now we will do what us Mexicans do so well: Take the bitter taste of this night and move on,” he added.
The
quake occurred near the Middle America Trench, a zone in the eastern
Pacific where one slab of the earth’s crust, called the Cocos Plate, is
sliding under another, the North American, in a process called
subduction.
The
movement is very slow — about three inches a year — and over time
stress builds because of friction between the slabs. At some point, the
strain becomes so great that the rock breaks and slips along a fault.
This releases vast amounts of energy and, if the slip occurs under the
ocean, can move a lot of water suddenly, causing a tsunami.
Subduction
zones ring the Pacific Ocean and are also found in other regions. They
are responsible for the world’s largest earthquakes and most devastating
tsunamis.
The
magnitude-9 earthquake off Japan in 2011, which led to the Fukushima
nuclear disaster, and the magnitude-9.1 quake in Indonesia in 2004,
which spawned tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people around
the Indian Ocean, are recent examples.
Those quakes each released about 30 times as much energy as the one in Mexico.
Mexico’s
government issued a tsunami warning off the coast of Oaxaca and Chiapas
after Thursday’s quake, but neither state appeared to have been
adversely affected by waves.
In Guatemala, the military was out Friday morning assessing the damage, found mainly in the western part of the country.
In
Huehuetenango, bricks and glass were strewn on the ground as walls in
the city collapsed. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city,
which was beginning to recover from a tremor in June, suffered more
damage to its historic center.
Paulina Villegas reported
from Juchitán de Zaragoza and Elisabeth Malkin and Kirk Semple from
Mexico City. Reporting was contributed by Azam Ahmed from Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic; Paulina Chavira, Marina Franco, Natalia Gutiérrez
Ávila, Michel Vega and Joel Patterson from Mexico City; Henry Fountain
from Bonita Springs, Fla.; and Nic Wirtz from Antigua, Guatemala.
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