Mexico Earthquake: Major earthquake strikes Mexico on Sept. 19 for third time

Mexico Earthquake: Major earthquake strikes Mexico on Sept. 19 for third time

Mexico Earthquake: A 7.6-magnitude earthquake rocked Mexico’s central Pacific coast on Monday and set off a seismic alert in the capital, which shook on the anniversary of two previous devastating earthquakes, killing at least one person.

The quake was centered about 37 kilometers (23 miles) southeast of the Aquila region near the border of Colima and Michoacán states and at a depth of 9.4 miles, it said.

 

local time, U.S. There were at least some initial reports of damage to buildings from the 7.5-magnitude quake that struck at 1:05 p.m., according to the Geological Survey.

 

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Twitter that the Navy secretary had told him that one person had died in the port city of Manzanillo in Colima when a wall collapsed at a mall.

 

Buildings were damaged in Colcoman, Michoacán, near the epicenter, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

 

“The Mexico Earthquake started slowly and then got really strong and continued and continued until it started to reverberate,” said 16-year-old Carla Cardenas, a resident of Colcoman, who witnessed it. She ran out of her family’s hotel and waited with a neighbor.

 

The hotel and some houses on the street exhibited cracks in the walls and parts of facades and roofs were broken off, she said.

 

Cardenas said that at the hotel he visited, the roof of the parking area caved in and fell to the ground, and there were cracks in the walls on the second floor.

 

The town’s hospital was seriously damaged, she said, but no one had been injured so far.

 

Mexico’s National Civil Defense Agency said that based on historical data from tsunamis in Mexico, variations of up to 32 inches (82 cm) in coastal water levels near the epicenter were possible. The U.S. The Tsunami Warning Center said dangerous tsunami waves were possible along the coast within 186 miles (300 kilometers) of the epicenter.

 

There were no reports of damage in the capital, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum tweeted.

 

The new quake warnings came an hour after earthquake alarms warbled in a nationwide earthquake simulation that marked major, deadly quakes that struck on the same date in 1985 and 2017.

 

“It’s really a coincidence,” said Paul Earle, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist, that this was the third Sept. 19 earthquake. There is no physical cause or statistical bias toward earthquakes in any given month in Mexico.

 

Earle said there is no single season or month for major earthquakes anywhere on Earth. But there is something predictable: people look for and sometimes find coincidences that look like patterns.

 

Humberto Garza held his 3-year-old son outside a restaurant in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. Garza said that like many who have been out and about since the earthquake, the earthquake warning sounded so soon after the annual simulation that he wasn’t sure it was real.

 

Earle said the quake was not related to or caused by the drill an hour or so earlier, nor was it connected to the damaging tremors in Taiwan the day before.

 

“I heard a danger sign, but it was too far away,” he said.

 

Power went out in parts of the city, including stoplights, snarling the capital’s already notorious traffic.

 

Dozens of employees were waiting outside the office of the city’s environmental ombudsman. Some were visibly shaking.