Residents grieve for loved ones as quake toll rises
JUCHITAN, Mexico — Life for many has moved outdoors in the quake-shocked city of Juchitan, where a third of the homes are reported uninhabitable and repeated aftershocks have scared people away from many structures still standing.
The death toll from Thursday night’s 8.1-magnitude earthquake rose to 96 on Monday as more fatalities were confirmed in the hard-hit southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. Thousands of houses and hundreds of schools had been damaged or destroyed. And hundreds of thousands of people were reported to be without water service.
The city of Juchitan is littered with rubble from the quake, which killed at least three dozen residents. Many people continue to sleep outside, fearful of more collapses, as strong aftershocks rattle the town.
On Sunday evening, 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 continue to be held outdoors for the foreseeable future, “because here we feel safer.”
Friends and family embraced and cried, overcome with emotion stored for days.
Yesenia Cruz Jimenez was relieved to hear that Mass would be held outdoors. Her house broke apart and her family is still sleeping in the yard, suffering rain and aftershocks.
“There is nowhere safe in town,” she said. “It is safer here and people can concentrate better in this place.”
Teams of soldiers and federal police with shovels and sledgehammers have fanned out across Juchitan’s neighborhoods to help demolish damaged buildings. Volunteers, many of them teens from religious or community groups in surrounding towns that were not as severely hit, turned out in force to distribute water and clothing or lend a hand.
Help was slower to arrive in Union Hidalgo, a town of about 20,000 people about 30 minutes to the east. Collapsed homes pocked neighborhoods there, and the town lacked electricity, water and cell phone service.
Delia Cruz Valencia stood in a puddle-filled street overseeing demolition of what remained of her sister’s house next door. Her sister took their mother for medical treatment outside the city before the earthquake and had not been able to make her way back. Men with pry bars ripped away the bottom half of a brick and stucco exterior wall to rescue a large wooden wardrobe because the house was too unstable to access through the door.
Cruz said she was next door with her two daughters when the earthquake struck shortly before midnight Thursday.
“We all three hugged, but even so we were moving” from the rolling earth, she said.
When she reached the street, she saw a cloud of dust rising from the house her sister shared with their mother. Cruz’s greatgrandfather had built it a century ago.
“If my sister had been here, she wouldn’t have been found alive,” Cruz said, choking back tears.