Daily Times

JUCHITAN: At least 36 people died when the most powerful earthquake to hit Mexico in over eight decades tore through buildings, forced mass evacuations and triggered alerts as far away as Southeast Asia.

The 8.1 magnitude quake off the southern coast late Thursday was stronger than a devastating 1985 temblor that flattened swathes of Mexico City and killed thousands.

This time damage to the city was limited as the quake was deeper and further from the capital. “It almost knocked me over,” said Gildardo Arenas Rios, a 64-year-old security guard in Mexico City’s Juarez neighbourhood, who was making his rounds when buildings began moving.

The southern town of Juchitan in Oaxaca state, near the epicentre, was hit particularly hard, with sections of the town hall, a hotel, a bar and other buildings reduced to rubble.

“The situation is Juchitan is critical; this is the most terrible moment in its history,” said Mayor Gloria Sanchez after the long, rumbling quake that also shook Guatemala and El Salvador nearby to the south. Shocked residents stepped through the rubble of dozens of collapsed buildings, including houses, a flattened Volkswagen dealership and Juchitan’s battered town hall.

“Look at what it did to my house,” said Maria Magdalena Lopez, in tears outside its shattered walls. “It was horrifying, it fell down.”

Alma Rosa, sitting in vigil with a relative by the body of a loved one draped in a red shroud, said: “We went to buy a coffin, but there aren’t any because there are so many bodies.” State Governor Alejandro Murat said 25 people died in Oaxaca, 17 of them in Juchitan. A spokesman for emergency services said nine people died east of Oaxaca in the state of Chiapas, where thousands of people in coastal areas were evacuated as a precaution when the quake sparked tsunami warnings. Waves rose as high as 2.3ft in Mexico, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said, though that threat passed.

Published in Daily Times, September 9^th 2017.