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Earthquakes
| Article
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12395 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
4,033 Words |
| Author
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T.A. Heppenheimer
T.A. Heppenheimer holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and
is a free-lance science writer living in Fountain Valley,
California. |
The world crumbled over one-day-old Lucia Rojas Mendoza and entombed her for seven days without food, water, or attention. The soft subsoil beneath Mexico City surged back and forth with almost rhythmic, metronomic regularity. It moved one foot every two seconds for two minutes. Broad-based buildings up to fifteen stories high, which had been designed to sway, were not flexible enough to rock resiliently along with the earth's motion. They collapsed, trapping occupants under tons of concrete and other rubble.
Little Lucia Mendoza, who had been born the day before, was one of nineteen babies buried alive that day at the Mexican government's Juarez and General hospitals. But the babies were retrieved with few or no injuries after they had lain alone deep under the debris for up to nine days.
The severe tremors that demolished the buildings were part of one of the most destructive earthquakes ever to shake the center of such a densely populated urban region. The quake, on September 19, 1985, measured 8.1 on the Richter scale and caused about 20,000 deaths and more than $3.5 billion in property damage in Mexico's capital and surrounding regions.
At the General Hospital, 116 staff members and about 200 patients were killed. The Juarez Hospital had an estimated 1,000 victims. Thousands of others died or were injured in collapsed homes, apartment buildings, and office buildings that caved in, including five housing Mexican government ministries.
History virtually repeated itself, though on a smaller scale, about a year later in Greece when an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale devastated the port city of Kalamata and four nearby villages on September 13, 1986.
A day later, a team of French rescue experts, accompanied by four specially trained German Shepherd dogs, was examining debris of a collapsed five-story apartment building when the dogs started to bark, a signal that they sensed the presence of people. The rescuers and onlookers fell silent and heard a baby's cries. After twenty minutes of combing through the rubble, the rescuers found a ten-day-old infant whose caretakers had apparently died in the rubble.
Less than a month later, on October 10, 1986, another earthquake battered El Salvador, killing over a thousand persons, injuring several thousand, and leaving more than 20,000 homeless. Hundreds of people were entombed in the
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