Earthquake in Mexico
National Geographic Article on 1986 Mexico City Earthquake
 | By ALLEN A. BORAIKO SENIOR EDITORIAL STAFF Photographs by JAMES L. STANFIELD NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER and GUILLERMO ALDANA E. |
| Collapsing floor by floor, the Benito Juarez Hospital became a tomb for patients and medical staff alike on September 19, 1985, when Mexico City's most devastating quake killed more than 9,000 people. MERMAN J. KOKOJAN, BLACK STAR | |
HIS THIRD-FLOOR office in downtown Mexico City, pathologist Jose Hernandez Cabanas bent over his morning work last September 19. At 7:18 he felt the eight-story building begin to shudder beneath him. Then the structure began to rock slowly back and forth in widening swings. Cabanas gripped a window frame. Looking out, he saw trees sway almost to the ground and ought, "This building can't hold up."
He lurched to a stairwell door but found it jammed shut. He smashed it open with his shoulder. On the quaking steps he slipped, fell, and tumbled downward, pitching helplessly from landing to landing. Passing the second floor, he heard people screaming to God for mercy.
Some 350 kilometers (220 miles) westward along Mexico's southwest Pacific coast, a giant slab of oceanic crust known as the Cocos plate had ruptured as it thrust beneath the continent's geologic foundation. Seismic waves a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima fanned out toward Mexico City, in pulses traveling 25,000 kilometers an hour (15,500 mph) and registering 8.1 on the Richter scale. So violent was the earthquake that tall buildings trembled in Texas, water sloshed in Colorado pools, and the entire Earth vibrated like a struck bell.
Cabanas landed hard near a groundlevel exit door. A tremor shook it open and he started through, only to fall again as flying debris gashed his head. Covered with blood, almost senseless, he crawled desperately into the street. At that instant his building toppled over backward.
When the shaking stopped, the battered and exhausted Cabanas grew terribly lonely. Almost all of the 18 million people in the world's most populous urban area, he thought, must certainly be badly hurt or dead, unable to aid or comfort him.
Schools, government bureaus, and office towers had collapsed upon themselves, or toppled, or been pounded to pieces by battering-ram blows from adjacent rocking buildings. Small shops lay crushed beside the stumps of taller neighbors that folded over upon them. Apartment buildings shorn of facades but still erect held tables and chairs and beds in miraculously undisturbed display, like grotesque dollhouse exhibits.
National Geographic, May 1986
<continue to the next page of the article> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10