A powerful earthquake hit west-central Mexico last night, sending panicked residents spilling into the streets of major cities and knocking out power supplies to many areas.
Twenty-one people were killed in the western states of Colima and Jalisco, officials said.
Mexico’s national seismological service put the quake’s magnitude at 7,6 on the Richter scale. The agency said it struck at 8.07 pm local time in Colima, a small state which includes the port city of Manzanillo, roughly 500km’s west of Mexico City.
Butch Kinerney, a spokesman for the US Geological Survey, said scientists there calculated the magnitude at 7,8. ”Because of the size of the earthquake and its shallow depth, USGS is expecting substantial damage,” Kinerney said.
The governor of Colima, Fernando Moreno Pena, said 19 people were killed in the quake, nine in the capital city of Colima and 10 others elsewhere in his state.
Radio reports said most of the victims were killed when portions of office and residential buildings collapsed near the center of Colima City.
It was difficult to communicate with all of Colima by telephone, partly due to overloaded lines, but Melchor Usua Quiroz, head of the state’s civil defence authorities, told the government news agency Notimex that the quake damaged homes and businesses and briefly left several people trapped in elevators across Colima.
In neighbouring Jalisco state, civil defence authorities said an 85-year-old woman in the town of Zapotitlan died after she rushed out of her house and was crushed by a falling security wall that had ringed her yard.
A one-year-old girl also died in Zapotitlan, but the circumstances surrounding her death remained unclear, authorities said early today. In Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital and Mexico’s second-largest city, authorities said the quake destroyed 40 homes and left more than 100 people homeless. Doctors treated dozens of people for panic attacks but there were no reports of physical injuries.
President Vicente Fox ordered the military to search for damage in the region, which includes remote villages, and to offer aid to those affected.
The president’s office, however, said an early inspection by the Mexican Navy found only power cuts.
In Mexico City, people rushed into the streets, many of them barefoot or wrapped in blankets against the chill.
Police cars drove slowly through the streets of Mexico City with sirens flashing, asking people over loudspeakers: ”Is everything OK?”
”I felt it very strongly and I saw all the people leave, very scared,” said Victor Morales, 46, an apartment building superintendent in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. ”I stayed calm because I trust in God.”
Some earthquakes of magnitude 7 have caused massive damage, but the effect of a quake can be affected by many factors, including its depth and the sort of earth through which it passes as it moves away from the epicentre.
Mexico City is built atop a former lakebed in a mountain valley which acts as a sort of amplifier for the motion of quakes.
The last substantial earthquake in the Colima area was in 1995. It registered 8.0 magnitude and killed 49 people. At least 100 people were injured in that quake, which was a little northwest of yesterday’s earthquake. – Guardian Unlimited Â