Death toll now at 90 as aftershocks still rattle Mexico
Life for JUCHITAN, MEXICO — many has moved outdoors in the quake-shocked city of Juchitan, where a third of the homes are reported uninhabit- able and repeated aftershocks have scared people away from many structures still standing.
The city Sunday was littered with rubble from Thursday night’s magnitude 8.1 earthquake, which killed at least 90 people across southern Mexico — at least three dozen of them in Juchitan itself. Officials in Oaxaca and Chi-
apas states said thousands of houses and hundreds of schools had been damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of thou
sands of people were reported to be without water service.
Many people continued to sleep outside, fearful of more collapses, as strong aftershocks
continued to rattle the town, including a magnitude 5.2 jolt early Sunday.
Some Juchitecos seeking solace trekked through the
destruction to find an open-air Mass on Sunday since many of the churches were either damaged or left vacant until they could be checked.
On Sunday, Bishop Oscar Campos Contreras conducted Mass for about 200 people at an open-air basketball court next to a collapsed school and in front of the heavily damaged St. Vicente Ferrer church, which lost one bell tower and very nearly the other.
Campos told those gathered that Mass would be outdoors for the foreseeable future, “because here we feel safer.” Friends and family embraced and cried, overcome with emotion stored for days. The bishop’s homily was part lesson
and part pep talk for a community stunned by destruction.
“There is no one who can say: ‘Nothing happened to me
because of my money, because of my strength or my youth or my prestige or my fame
nothing happened,’” Campos said. “We are all weak.”