MEXICO CITY — A strong earthquake shook southern Mexico Tuesday morning, killing at least four people, causing buildings hundreds of miles away to sway and prompting residents to flee homes and workplaces to seek safety on the streets.
The earthquake’s magnitude was 7.5, according to Mexico’s national seismological service, and was centered in the Pacific Ocean, about 14 miles off the coast, south of Crucecita, a beach town in the southern state of Oaxaca that is popular with tourists.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the magnitude at 7.4, though is not unusual for preliminary measurements to vary.
By early afternoon on Tuesday, officials said, there had been 147 aftershocks to the larger quake, and officials warned that more were expected.
But though images on social media and local news reports showed rubble from damaged buildings in Oaxaca, officials reported that the structural impact had been minimal.
“Fortunately there was no major damage,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a Twitter video early in the afternoon, one of a series he posted, relaying updates from David León, who is Mexico’s national coordinator of civil protection, and other officials.
A phone pressed to his ear, the president said there had been “collapses, some broken glass, signage fell, walls, but nothing serious.”
Mr. López Obrador urged everyone to remain attentive to further seismic warnings and to stay calm. “I hope and I wish with all my soul that there will be no more damaging aftershocks,” he said.
In Mexico City, more than 300 miles to the northwest, buildings swayed and shuddered, but only some cosmetic damage to buildings was reported.
The mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, said neither the city’s security command center nor officials conducting overflights of the municipality had reported any “serious” effects from the earthquake.
Flora Pedro Mora, the administrator of Mansiones Cruz del Mar, a condo-hotel complex near Crucecita in Oaxaca described the earthquake as “horrible.”
“It was like one of those movies,” she said, audibly shuddering.
But she added that, apart from some roof tiles that were knocked loose and fell to the ground, the property suffered no serious damage. Though some hotels and resort properties in the area, generally referred to as Huatulco, had begun to reopen in the past week after an extended shutdown in response to the pandemic, Mansiones Cruz del Mar was still closed to guests.
The state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, reported that the earthquake caused the temporary shutdown of its refinery in the port city of Salina Cruz, and that a fire there was quickly put out.
Many Mexicans have grown accustomed to earthquakes, taking them as an immutable fact of life in a country situated near the colliding boundaries of several sections of the earth’s crust.
Elda Cantú and Natalie Kitroeff contributed reporting from Mexico City.
"four" - Google News
June 24, 2020 at 06:24AM
https://ift.tt/3fQZek7
Earthquake Shakes Mexico, Killing at Least Four - The New York Times
"four" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ZSDCx7
https://ift.tt/3fdGID3
No comments:
Post a Comment