Dozens dead, hundreds injured as Mexico suffers ‘worst quake in a century’
Poor isolated communities worst hit as 8.2-magnitude tremors turn buildings to rubble and block roads
THE strongest earthquake to hit Mexico for a century left at least 58 dead and hundreds injured yesterday, wreaking destruction on the country’s impoverished south and triggering tsunami alerts around the region.
Rescue workers were struggling to reach isolated rural communities across the worst-hit states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, many of them tucked high in rugged mountains.
The powerful quake damaged build- ings as far away as Mexico City, where the iconic Angel of Independence swayed on its column and millions ran out of their homes amid intense tremors in the middle of the night.
It was also felt in much of Guatemala, where damage to buildings was also reported.
Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president, said the quake had registered a magnitude of 8.2, the strongest the country had suffered in more than a century; the US Geological Survey put it at 8.1. He reported more than 260 aftershocks up to a magnitude of 6.1, and warned there could be more to come, urging people to stay safe and listen to public announcements.
Schools were closed in 11 states so officials could inspect the buildings for structural damage.
Mr Peña Nieto offered his “sincere condolences” to the families of the dead. He said the quake had been felt by around 50 million of Mexico’s roughly 120million population.
Luis Felipe Puente, the head of the country’s disaster response agency, said 58 people had lost their lives with 45 killed in Oaxaca, 10 in Chiapas and three in Tabasco.
The governor of Tabasco said two children had been killed there. One of them was a baby on life support in hospital, who died when the power to the machine failed.
“It’s a truly critical situation,” said Óscar Cruz López, Mexico City’s municipal secretary. “The city. It’s as if it had been bombed.”
Almost two million people were left without electricity, with up to 200,000 still without power last night. In Juchitan, parts of the town hall, a hotel, a bar and other buildings were reduced to rubble. The indigenous town has attracted international attention for its traditional embrace of the third gender, with transgenders known as muxes occupying a prominent place in Zapotec communities.
Tsunami waves up to 3ft high hit the southern coast, while alerts were issued for Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and Honduras,
‘All the wires began to swing, the electricity cut out and the sky turned a horrible red colour’
and as far south as Ecuador. Guillermo Rosas, a civil protection officer in the Chiapas state capital of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, said the quake was the strongest he had ever felt. He said it was the poorest who had been most affected, with flimsily constructed homes being razed to the ground.
Chiapas and Oaxaca are the two poorest states in Mexico, with around three-quarters of their populations living in poverty. In Tonalá, Chiapas, one of the hardest hit towns in the area, Samadeni Montero described how her house started to shake late on Thursday night. “I was inside the house in bed when I began to feel the movement. I thought it would pass quickly, but it grew stronger and stronger. So the first thing I did was to grab my daughter,” she told the news agency EFE.
“All the wires began to swing, the electricity cut out and the sky turned a horrible red colour.”
Like many, she spent the rest of the night sleeping outside her home, her family too terrified to go back inside.
In Mexico City, tower blocks swayed and lights went out as residents abandoned their homes.
Carlin Crowder, a US expat living in a 28-storey high rise in the east of the city, told CNN: “The building was definitely rocking, me and my neighbours immediately started going down the stairs, there were parents with babies ... it was not my first earthquake in a tall building but definitely a scary one.”
The US Geological Survey said the quake had its epicenter in the Pacific Ocean, 54 miles (87 km) southwest of the town of Pijijiapan in Chiapas, at a depth of 43 miles.
Mexico regularly experiences tremors. In 1985 a devastating 8.0 earthquake killed around 5,000 people in Mexico City. A 7.9 magnitude earthquake in 1957 claimed dozens of lives.