Quake off Mexico crumbles buildings

Death toll rises as crews search ruin

A crowd gathers near a partially collapsed hotel Friday in Matias Romero in Mexico’s Oaxaca state. Dozens of earthquake deaths were confirmed in Oaxaca state.
A crowd gathers near a partially collapsed hotel Friday in Matias Romero in Mexico’s Oaxaca state. Dozens of earthquake deaths were confirmed in Oaxaca state.

MEXICO CITY -- One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico struck off the country's southern Pacific coast, toppling hundreds of buildings and sending panicked people fleeing into the streets in the middle of the night. At least 61 people were reported killed.

The quake that hit minutes before midnight Thursday was strong enough to cause buildings to sway violently in the capital city more than 650 miles away. As beds banged against walls, people still wearing pajamas ran out of their homes and gathered in frightened groups.

Rodrigo Soberanes, who lives near San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, the state nearest the epicenter, said his house "moved like chewing gum."

The shaking was followed by a second national emergency for Mexican agencies as Hurricane Katia made landfall north of Tecolutla in Veracruz state late Friday.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Katia's maximum sustained winds had dropped to 75 mph, making it a Category 1 storm, but it was still expected to produce life-threatening floods and a dangerous storm surge off the Gulf of Mexico.

The head of Mexico's civil defense agency confirmed the deaths of 45 people in the southern state of Oaxaca. Another 12 people died in Chiapas and four more in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco.

Still, the resounding feeling in the country was one, at least initially, of relief that the damage was not more widespread, given the nation's vulnerability to earthquakes and the capital's density.

"We are assessing the damage, which will probably take hours, if not days," said President Enrique Pena Nieto, who addressed the nation just two hours after the quake. "But the population is safe overall. There should not be a major sense of panic."

Later Friday, Pena Nieto toured the stricken area, where he met with residents amid the debris of crumbled buildings.

"The priority in Juchitan is re-establishing supply of water and food, as well as medical attention for those affected," Pena Nieto said via Twitter.

The worst-hit city appeared to be Juchitan, a city of about 100,000 people on the narrow waist of Oaxaca known as the Isthmus.

The regional hospital, a church dedicated to the city's patron saint, San Vicente Ferrer, and half of the city's 19th century City Hall collapsed, said Juan Antonio Garcia, the director of a local news website, Cortamortaja. Hospital staff members managed to evacuate the patients and treated them by the lights of their cellphones through the night in an empty lot, he said.

Juchitan's City Hall was a handsome two-story building, known for its 30 arches occupying the entire block of the city's central square. But as the earth shook just before midnight, half of the structure was reduced to rubble.

"Countless houses have collapsed," Garcia added. He said it was too early to know the full extensive of the damage.

In a video posted on the Facebook page of a local television station, Pamela Teran, who introduced herself as a city councilor, begged state and federal authorities for help.

"Please, we urgently need as much help as you can send," she said. "We need hands and manpower to try and dig out the people that we know are buried under the rubble."

Mexico's capital escaped major damage, but the quake terrified sleeping residents, many of whom remember the catastrophic 1985 earthquake -- with a magnitude of 8.0 -- that killed thousands of people and devastated large parts of the city.

"The scariest part of it all is that if you are an adult, and you've lived in this city your adult life, you remember 1985 very vividly," said Alberto Briseno, a 58-year-old bar manager in Condesa district. "This felt as strong and as bad, but from what I see, we've been spared from major tragedy."

"Now we will do what us Mexicans do so well: Take the bitter taste of this night and move on," he added.

After the 1985 quake, many of the city's buildings were built to withstand severe tremors. In the seconds before the earthquake started late Thursday, earthquake warning sirens blared throughout the capital.

Families were jerked awake by the alarm's grating howl. Some shouted as they dashed out of rocking apartment buildings. Even the iconic Angel of Independence Monument swayed as the quake's waves rolled through the city's soft soil.

Part of a bridge on a highway being built to the site of Mexico City's planned new international airport collapsed because of the earthquake, local media reported.

Elsewhere, the extent of destruction was still emerging. Hundreds of buildings collapsed or were damaged, power was cut at least briefly to more than 1.8 million people, and authorities closed schools Friday in at least 11 states to check them for safety.

The quake struck at 11:49 p.m. local time Thursday. Its epicenter was 102 miles west of Tapachula in Chiapas, with a depth of 43.3 miles, the Geological Survey said.

Dozens of aftershocks rattled the region in the following hours.

Three people were killed in San Cristobal, including two women who died when a house and a wall collapsed, Chiapas Gov. Manuel Velasco said.

"There is damage to hospitals that have lost energy," he said. "Homes, schools and hospitals have been damaged."

In Tabasco, a child died when a wall collapsed, and an infant died in a children's hospital when that facility lost electricity, cutting off the ventilator, Gov. Arturo Nunez said.

The earthquake's impact was blunted a bit by the fact that it was centered 100 miles offshore. It hit off Chiapas' Pacific coast, near the Guatemalan border, with a magnitude of 8.1 -- equal to Mexico's strongest quake of the past century, in 1932.

The quake triggered tsunami warnings and some tall waves, but there was no major damage from the sea. Authorities briefly evacuated a few residents of coastal Tonala and Puerto Madero because of the warning.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center reported waves of about 3 feet above the tide level off Salina Cruz, Mexico. Smaller tsunami waves were observed on the coast or measured by ocean gauges elsewhere.

In neighboring Guatemala, President Jimmy Morales appeared on national television to call for calm while emergency crews surveyed damage. Officials later said only four people had been injured there and several dozen homes damaged.

The quake's epicenter was in a seismic hot spot in the Pacific where one tectonic plate dives under another. These subduction zones are responsible for producing some of the biggest quakes in history, including the 2011 Fukushima disaster and the 2004 Sumatra quake that spawned a deadly tsunami.

Thursday's quake occurred near where three tectonic plates, the Cocos, the Caribbean and the North American, collide.

The area has seen at least six other quakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater since 1900. Three of those occurred within a nine-month span in 1902-03, according to Mexico's National Seismological Service.

In Veracruz, tourists abandoned coastal hotels as winds and rains picked up ahead of Hurricane Katia's landfall. Workers set up emergency shelters and cleared storm drains, and residents were urged to avoid going outside or crossing flooded rivers.

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Stevenson and Frank Griffiths of The Associated Press; by Elisabeth Malkin, Paulina Villegas and Azam Ahmed of The New York Times; and by Joshua Partlow of The Washington Post.

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AP/LUIS ALBERTO CRUZ

Soldiers remove debris Friday from a partly collapsed municipal building in Juchitan in Mexico’s Oaxaca state.

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AP/MARCO UGARTE

A woman and child in Mexico City stop Friday next to the rubble of a wall that collapsed during Thursday’s earthquake.

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A map showing the location of the earthquake in Mexico.

A Section on 09/09/2017

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