JUCHITAN: At least 58 people were killed 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 earthquake off the southern coast late on Thursday was stronger than a devastating 1985 quake 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, but still shocking.

“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 in Juchitan is critical; this is the most terrible moment in its history,” the town’s mayor, Gloria Sanchez said, after the long, rumbling quake that also shook Guatemala and El Salvador.

The government said 25 people were killed in Oaxaca, and the state’s governor Alejandro Murat said 17 of those were in Juchitan.

A spokesman for emergency services said seven people died east of Oaxaca in the state of Chiapas, where thousands of people living on the coast were evacuated from homes 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.

State oil company Pemex said it was checking for damage at its installations. President Enrique Pena Nieto said operations at the Salina Cruz refinery in the same region as the epicentre were temporarily suspended as a precautionary measure.

Woken in the night

Two children died north of Chiapas in Tabasco state, the local governor said. At least 250 people in Oaxaca were also injured, according to Agriculture Minister Jose Calzada.

Classes were suspended in much of central and southern Mexico on Friday to allow authorities to review damage.

In one central neighbourhood of Mexico City, dozens of people stood outside after the quake, some wrapped in blankets against the cool night air. Children were crying.

Liliana Villa, 35, who was in her apartment when the quake struck, fled to the street in her nightclothes.

“It felt horrible, and I thought, ‘this (building) is going to fall’,” she said.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the 8.1 magnitude quake had its epicentre in the Pacific, 87km southwest of the town of Pijijiapan.

John Bellini, a geophysicist at the USGS’s National Earthquake Information Centre in Golden, Colorado, said Thursday’s quake was the strongest in Mexico since an 8.1 earthquake struck the western state of Jalisco in 1932.

Across the Pacific Ocean, the national disaster agency of the Philippines put the country’s eastern seaboard on alert for possible tsunamis, though in the end no evacuations were ordered.

Rescue workers laboured through the night in badly affected areas to look for people who were possibly trapped in collapsed buildings. By early Friday morning, the human cost of Mexican quake appeared to be less severe than many far less powerful tremors.

People in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest cities, ran out into the streets in pyjamas and alarms sounded after the quake struck just before midnight.

“I had never been anywhere where the earth moved so much. At first I laughed, but when the lights went out, I didn’t know what to do,” said Luis Carlos Briceno, an architect, 31, who was visiting Mexico City. “I nearly fell over.”

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2017