A magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook downtown Mexico City at midday on Thursday, without “any human or material damage” being recorded so far.
More fear than harm: a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook downtown Mexico City at midday on Thursday, without “any human or material damage” being recorded so far.
In city traumatized by the memory of the two deadly earthquakes of 1985 and 2017residents took to the streets when the seismic alert sounded shortly after 2:00 p.m. local time (8:00 p.m. GMT), AFP noted.
“We were at the restaurant when the alarm sounded. We all ran out,” Andrea Muñoz, 28, who works in the Condesa-Roma sector, where many foreigners live, told AFP.
The epicenter of the earthquake was located in the state of Pueblaabout a hundred kilometers south of the megacity with more than nine million inhabitants, according to preliminary information from the Mexican seismological service.
“There are no reports of any damage in Mexico City,” Mayor Marti Batres immediately reacted on X.
“It seems that the shock was not that strong,” also tempered the President of the Republic, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, promising other information.
The governor of the state of Puebla, Sergio Salomon, indicated that the earthquake had been felt in several localities, with no damage reported so far.
Murderous precedents
The inhabitants of the capital are all the more reactive to the shrill noise of the anti-seismic alarm as they remember two deadly earthquakes in the last 40 years.
On September 19, 1985, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake devastated a large part of Mexico City.. The earthquake, whose epicenter was in the west on the Pacific coast, shook much of the center and south of the country.
The great earthquake of 1985 left 12,843 dead, according to a count of official death certificates published by the newspaper Excelsior 20 years later, in 2015. Civil organizations put forward the figure of 20,000 dead at the time.
And 32 years later to the day, on September 19, 2017, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake killed 369 people. and extensive damage in the central neighborhoods of Mexico City.
In 2022, the earth shook for the third time in a row on September 19without causing any casualties.
Just like in 2017, millions of people had participated just before in an earthquake simulation exercise that the authorities organize every September 19.
An alert system has been set up in the megacity. In the event of an earthquake, alarms are triggered in the streets and buildings, warning the population one minute before the earthquake.
Mexico lies between five tectonic plates, whose movements make the country one of the most seismic in the world, particularly on its Pacific coast to the west.
Part of Mexico City, mainly the center, sits on the muddy floor of an ancient lake, making it particularly susceptible to earthquakes.