SCENE: ‘Everyone’s scared’ as 2nd shock in 2 weeks jolts nation
MEXICO CITY — Leslie Moody Castro was in an art gallery in Roma Norte, a fashionable neighborhood just southwest of downtown Mexico City, talking about an upcoming show.
Then the tremors hit. The building began to move.
“Not again!” the art curator yelled, grabbing her friend’s arm and rushing downstairs and outside.
In Roma Norte and other nearby neighborhoods, the quake’s impact sent the facades of local businesses crumbling to the ground, in mangled piles of brick, metal and shattered glass.
Dozens of buildings
collapsed across the city, sending authorities scrambling to rescue trapped and injured residents.
As Castro and other residents rushed for safety, the 7.1 magnitude earthquake shattered windows, knocked out power, shut down the subway system and shuttered Mexico City’s international airport. Castro, who works in both Mexico and the U.S., had planned to fly back to Austin on Tuesday, before the earthquake put her plans on hold.
The tremors came on the anniversary of an earthquake in 1985 that devastated the city, killing more than 10,000 Mexicans and damaging tens of thousands of the city’s buildings.
Drills become real life
Though Tuesday’s quake has already been blamed for at least 139 deaths — a number sure to rise — its impact was likely blunted by the lessons previous earthquakes had taught the city.
“The paradox of this is that today the government was doing a drill at 11 a.m. in Mexico City to prepare for earthquakes,” said Mario Cedeño, owner of a coffee shop in La Condesa neighborhood. “At 1:14, the real thing happened.”
Better preparation likely saved many lives, he said.
“In 1985, people were not prepared, and the catastrophe overpowered the government’s capacity to attend to the people,” he said. “The heroes then were the citizens who went out to help by the thousands. Now, people were more alert thanks to official information.”
Out in the streets, residents hugged each other and tried to stay calm as they sought safety, fleeing damaged gas lines and trying to find their friends and family. Many were glued to their phones, recording video of the damage. Some posted videos on Twitter showing buildings collapsing and explosions as gas leaks ignited, sending fireballs into the sky.
Patients evacuated from nearby hospitals lay in stretchers in boulevards southwest of downtown, removed from the buildings for their safety. Elsewhere, first responders set up makeshift hospitals to care for the quake’s victims and searched for victims trapped in the rubble.
The earthquake tore through Mexico City’s swampy soil, shaking structures, sending gas spewing into the air and gnarling power lines like tangled fishing wire.
Cell service and electricity were knocked out in many areas. In the northern part of the city, the quake’s reverberations turned the normally calm canals of Xochimilco, a popular tourist destination, into a sloshing, wave-filled mess.
One resident in Cuernavaca posted video of a bridge cracked apart, its span felled. The force of the quake could be felt hundreds of miles away.
“It was terrible,” said Sam Posadas, a customs worker in Veracruz, who’d been at home in her thirdfloor apartment when she felt the shocks.
In Mexico City, damage was widespread in many of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods, including La Condesa and Roma Norte , two artsy neighborhoods southwest of the city center.
“It felt like a bouncy castle — on a boat,” Castro said.
After the shaking stopped, she walked the seven blocks home to her apartment, stopping along the way to talk to friends to make sure they were all right.
“Everyone was on the street,” she said.
‘Everyone’s scared’
At her apartment, she found most of her possessions strewn across the floor, tossed from shelves and cabinets. Somehow, a bottle of tequila on her refrigerator escaped unscathed.
She then went back into the streets to survey the damage.
Nearby, Jesus Cruzvillegas had been at work at the Human Rights Commission of Distrito Federal (Mexico City) in Narvarte.
He was in a meeting and didn’t hear the earthquake alarm. Then he felt the tremors.
“We left, running,” he said. “Luckily, there wasn’t any damage or losses where I found myself.”
Mexico City Mayor Miguel Mancera said the earthquake leveled at least 29 buildings there. Of the 16 municipalities included in the greater Mexico City area, four were especially hard hit and did not have power, water or gas: Cuauhtemoc, Benito Juarez, Iztapalapa and Tlalpan.
Puebla Gov. Tony Gali said the quake had damaged buildings in the city of Cholula, including collapsed church steeples.
The earthquake came less than two weeks after another earthquake struck southern Mexico, killing more than 90 people.
Memories of that quake had barely begun to fade before the ground shook Tuesday.
“Everyone’s scared,” Castro said. “Everyone’s talking about last week.”