Mexico City's Earthquake 1985

Mexico City 1985

On September 19, 1985, Mexico City experienced one of the hardest earthquakes ever recorded in that country. “At 7:18 in the morning, the residents of Mexico City were jolted by an 8.1 magnitude earthquake, one of the strongest to ever hit the area. The earthquake was even more devastated due to the type of ground upon which the city sits. Mexico City is on a plateau surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. The plateau regions was once covered by lakes, as the aquifer under the city has slowly drained, it has been discovered that the city sits atop a combination of dirt and sand that is much less stable than bedrock and can be quite unstable during an earthquake.” (Staff, 2009)

“The quake was center about 250 miles west of the city, but do to the relatively unstable ground underneath the city, serious shaking lasted for nearly 3 minutes. The prolonged ground movement caused several old hotels, including the Regis, Versailles and Romano, to crumble. A building at the National College of Professional Education fell, trapping hundreds of students who were attending early-morning classes. Many factories in the city, built with shoddy materials, also could not stand. Also, the agitation caused gas mains to break, causing fires and explosions throughout the city. When the damages were finally assessed, 3,000 buildings were demolished and another 100,000 suffered serious damage.” (Staff, 2009) To this day, the death toll has been in dispute. About 5,000 bodies were recovered from the debris and represent the total of legally certified deaths but does not include those who were missing and never recovered. Reports have numbered the dead anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 (claimed by a number of citizens' groups) to 45,000 claimed by the National Seismological Service. Part of the explanation for that was the hour in which the earthquake struck, approximately 7:20am, when people were awake but not in the many schools and office buildings that were severely...