Deadly, Powerful Earthquake Hits Off Mexico; Tsunami Waves Observed

This photo provided by the United States Geological Survey shows where a magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck

The most powerful earthquake to hit Mexico in 100 years struck off the nation’s Pacific Coast late Thursday, rattling millions of residents in Mexico City with its violent tremors, killing at least 32 people and leveling some areas in the southern part of the country closest to where the quake occurred.

About 50 million people across Mexico felt the earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.2, the government said. In the capital, the force of the temblor sent residents of the megacity fleeing into the streets at midnight, shaken by the alarms blaring over loudspeakers and a full minute of tremors. Windows broke, walls collapsed, and the city seemed to convulse in terrifying waves; the quake even rocked the city’s landmark Angel of Independence monument.

While Mexico City seemed to have been spared extensive damage to infrastructure, according to the government’s preliminary assessment, the effects in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca were probably more severe. The tally of damage — and death — probably will be difficult to assess initially, given the remote nature of many areas.

Alejandro Murat, the governor of Oaxaca, told the Televisa network that at least 23 people had died in the state, and local officials said residents were buried under the rubble of buildings.

Luis Manuel García Moreno, the secretary of civil protection for the state of Chiapas, said the toll there had risen to seven, and two children died in the state of Tabasco, one when a wall collapsed, the other after a respirator lost power in a hospital.

The effects were also felt in Guatemala, where at least one person died and homes along the border with Mexico were leveled.

Mexico is situated near several boundaries where portions of the earth’s crust collide. The quake on Thursday was more powerful than the one that killed nearly 10,000 people in 1985.

But while the quake on Thursday struck nearly 450 miles from the capital and off the coast of Chiapas State, the one in 1985 was much closer to the city — so the shaking, coupled with Mexico City being situated on an ancient lake bed, proved much more deadly.

After the 1985 disaster, construction codes were reviewed and stiffened. Today, Mexico’s construction laws are considered as strict as those in the United States or Japan.

After the quake hit, people in Mexico City streamed out of their homes in the dark, wearing nightclothes, standing amid the apartment buildings, cafes and bars in upscale neighborhoods and the dense warrens of the city’s working-class communities. In the Condesa area, neighbors watched in awe as power lines swayed alongside trees and buildings. In several neighborhoods, the power was out, though it was restored within an hour, at least in the wealthier parts of the capital.

For a city used to earthquakes, Thursday’s quake left a lasting impression on residents, for both its force and duration.

“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 Briseño, a 58-year-old bar manager in Condesa. “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.

The quake occurred near the Middle America Trench, a zone in the eastern Pacific where one slab of the earth’s crust, called the Cocos Plate, is sliding under another, the North American, in a process called subduction.

The movement is very slow — about three inches a year — and over time stresses build because of friction between the slabs. At some point the strain becomes so great that the rock breaks and slips along a fault. This releases vast amounts of energy and, if the slip occurs under the ocean, can move a lot of water suddenly, causing a tsunami.

Subduction zones ring the Pacific Ocean and are found in other regions as well. They are responsible for the world’s largest earthquakes and most devastating tsunamis. The magnitude 9 earthquake off Japan in 2011 that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the magnitude 9.1 quake in Indonesia in 2004 that spawned tsunamis that killed a quarter of a million people around the Indian Ocean are recent examples.

Those quakes each released about 30 times as much energy as the one in Mexico.

Mexico’s government issued a tsunami warning off the coast of Oaxaca and Chiapas after Thursday’s quake, but neither state appeared to have been adversely affected by waves in the aftermath. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the largest wave recorded on Mexico’s Pacific Coast measured less than four feet.