Juchitan mourns - and gets to work
MEXICO: The Catholic priest waited out the earthquake in his spartan quarters, praying that the walls would stand. When he stepped out alone into the colonial courtyard late Thursday, local time, his place of worship had transformed into a ghoulish scene of destruction.
He took in the shattered belltower, collapsed church walls, two cars pancaked under the rubble. Across the plaza, school classrooms had been flattened. A few blocks away, Juchitan city hall lay in ruins. ‘‘I couldn’t believe it,’’ said Lucio Santiago Santiago, 58, the priest at the San Vicente Ferrer church, its foundation dating to the 16th century, in the city that endured some of the most extreme damage from Mexico’s massive earthquake. Within minutes, he said, residents were screaming and shouting about the dead. ‘‘It was chaos.’’
‘‘This is a historic temple dear to the people’s heart,’’ Santiago said. ‘‘And look at it now.’’
In this city that has recorded more than half of the earthquake’s fatalities, residents yesterday had turned to the work of mourning the dead and cleaning up the wreckage. Teams of rescue workers with K-9 units searched through rubble for possible survivors while construction workers with backhoes and dump trucks cleared debris. Soldiers and police had sealed off several blocks around the city square while funeral processions passed amid downed power lines and broken glass. At least 36 people are known to have died here.
On Friday night, local time, President Enrique Pen˜ a Nieto said that in Juchitan, a city of about 100,000 people in the state of Oaxaca, a third of homes either collapsed or were left uninhabitable by the earthquake. In block after block, there are houses with crumbled concrete walls or collapsed ceramic-tile roofs. Pen˜ a Nieto declared a threeday period of national mourning and vowed to help rebuild. By yesterday, the country’s total death toll had risen to 65 people.
The 8.2-magnitude earthquake that began a few minutes before midnight on Thursday was centred in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s southwestern coast. The rumbling was felt for hundreds of kilometres and caused buildings to sway in Mexico City. But the damage to lives and property was clustered in southern states.
- Washington Post