Mexico’s strongest earthquake in a century kills 61
JUCHITAN DE ZARAGOZA: Thousands of homes here 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 handphones.
By the time the earthquake’s tremors finally faded, at least 36 people here were dead.
“It’s a truly critical situation,” Óscar Cruz López, the city’s municipal secretary, said on Friday. “The city,” he said, and then paused. “It’s as if it had been bombed.”
Overall, the earthquake, the most powerful to hit the country in a century, killed at least 61 people in Mexico, all of them in the southern part of the country that was closer to the quake’s epicentre 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.
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 pyjamas.
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.
In the southern part of the country, however, at least 12 people died in Chiapas state and four died in neighbouring 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 more than 400 houses had been destroyed and that about 1,700 others had been damaged.
In Oaxaca state, at least 45 people were killed, including the 36 here, a provincial city of 100,000.
“A total disaster,” Mayor Gloria Sánchez López declared in telephone interview in which she appealed for help.
“Don’t leave us alone.” President Enrique Peña Nieto flew to the region on Friday to assess the damage. 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 yesterday.
“You can count on us,” President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia said on Twitter.
With the hospital, the region’s main medical centre, 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.