SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS
Crews hopeful in Mexico
The day after Mexico’s latest deadly quake, Calgary native David Agren was still feeling the effects.
“I’m still shaking, it was a serious, serious fright ... it just shook hard and violently,” said Agren, a freelance journalist who has endured several earthquakes in the decade he’s called Mexico City home.
When the 7.1-magnitude shaker struck, Agren said he grabbed his phone and fled outside, joining hundreds of other terrified residents seeking safety.
“When I got out into the street, everyone knew it was bad ... it was easily the most violent earthquake I’ve felt,” he said.
Agren, who lives on the third floor of a four-storey apartment building, said his location in southern Mexico City is on a slightly more solid footing than other parts of the massive metropolis built on an unstable lake bed.
The strength of those who’ve suffered and the help extended them after the catastrophe is deeply moving, he said.
“People really do endure a lot, it’s really quite admirable,” he said.
People volunteering to help at a school that collapsed, killing or trapping dozens, are being turned away due to the massive response, said Agren, who has no plans to return to Canada after the second earthquake this month.
“It never crossed my mind. It’s made me glad I live where I do,” he said.
Calgarian Barry Boutin was preparing to give a presentation in his job as a building emergency safety specialist when he received a text from his Mexican fiancee, Lulu Hernandez, that she’d survived the quake an hour earlier.
“My gut was tied in knots, I was sick to my stomach,” said Boutin, whose father was killed in the Pine Lake tornado in 2000.
“I was glad she was all right, but I couldn’t get a hold of her two daughters.”
Hernandez, 52, said she was on the second floor of her Mexico City home and didn’t get a chance to flee outside.
“I felt it very strong. Doors started opening and closing as if a ghost were moving them. My bed was moving hard,” she said, adding her two adult daughters living in the region are OK.
Boutin said he looks forward to the day Hernandez can escape the earthquake danger when she moves to Calgary after a wedding that might take place by year’s end.
“I was on the phone with her when the first earthquake hit, it was pretty scary,” he said, referring to the 8.1-magnitude quake that struck Mexico on Sept. 7.