Everyone ran from the studio but Llamas and Guerrero stayed, hiding under their anchor desks. On Line 2, there was no service between stations Bellas Artes and Taxqueña. https://www.livescience.com/30791-deadly-1985-mexico-city-earthquake.html Much of Mexico's volcanic and seismic activity stems from the movement of the North American plate against the Cocos and Pacific plates and it is one of the most active trenches in the world. ", "Misa en honor de costureras muertas en 1985", "Los buenos los malos y las feas cifras y realidades del terremoto segun un libro de un brigadista de Plácido Domingo", "Testimonios del sismo del '85: Francisco, 36 horas bajo los escombros del Conalep", "Los escombros del colapsado Conalep tocaban la puerta", "Terremoto de la Ciudad de Mexico de 1985", Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training-ADST, "Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico, A. C., CIRES – MÉXICO", "Preparation saves lives in Mexican Earthquake", "A 20 años de terremoto: Los topos de Tlatelolco", "Mexican elite earthquake rescue team, Los Topos, departs for Italy", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1985_Mexico_City_earthquake&oldid=1000131353, Articles with dead external links from October 2010, Articles with dead external links from June 2017, Articles with permanently dead external links, Short description is different from Wikidata, All articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases, Articles with specifically marked weasel-worded phrases from April 2019, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Los Televiteatros (now Centro Cultural Telmex), Hotel D'Carlo and Hotel Prado, which were located in the, This page was last edited on 13 January 2021, at 18:58. Rescue workers soon arrived to start digging through the rubble. [9][10], The earthquake occurred in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of the Mexican state of Michoacán, a distance of more than 350 km (220 mi) from the city, in the Cocos Plate subduction zone, specifically in a section of the fault line known as the Michoacán seismic gap. The western and northwestern parts of the city are outside the old lakeshores and are located on sands from eroding volcanic cones that surround the Valley of Mexico. A pre-event quake of magnitude 5.2 occurred on 28 May 1985. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated.Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. The earthquake was located about 110 kilometers northeast of Rome. Many of these patients were very ill. 1,900 patients were successfully moved from here, without any deaths, in just four hours. This structure failed, causing the near total collapse of long distance communications between Mexico City and the rest of the world. While hard rock simply shakes with the same frequency and amplitude as seismic waves, the unconsolidated sediments of an ancient lake bed react differently: They can amplify the shaking and even worse, they can lose their consistency and become a liquid.  |  [34], These earthquakes created many political difficulties for the then-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) or Institutional Revolutionary Party. [4], Cuauhtémoc, which includes the historic downtown, suffered the most damage. The sequence of events included a foreshock of magnitude 5.2 that occurred the prior May, the main shock on 19 September, and two large aftershocks. Over 720,000 tons of debris was removed during the first six weeks after the event. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake struck in the early morning of 19 September at 07:17:50 (CST) with a moment magnitude of 8.0 and a maximal Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). Photo Mehmet Celebi, USGS, A lake bed in a basin, however, is one of the worst grounds for constructing a building. The 2,158 beds of the Ministry of Health (SSA) were lost, representing 43 percent of its capacity in the city. These "topos" have developed into highly trained specialists in times of disaster, with branches in other parts of Mexico. Most of the beds that it lost were dedicated to tertiary, high-technology care. 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. [19], More than 4,000 people were rescued alive. Within minutes, the steel-frame structure collapsed, crushing and trapping many people inside. A few notable examples are: the Torre Latinoamericana, one of the first buildings in Mexico City to do so, the Torre Ejecutiva Pemex, built before the 1985 earthquake, and the Torre Mayor, built in 2003. In this particular area, 258 buildings completely crumbled, 143 partially collapsed and 181 were seriously damaged. Until today, nobody really knows how many people perished as a result of the earthquake. Basically, this document required the cooperation of community groups in exchange for solid commitments from the agency. More than 10,000 people were killed, 30,000 were injured, and large parts of the city were destroyed. These "soft" stories were particularly flexible and tended to collapse after prolonged shaking. [20], In March, only weeks after taking office, Camacho Solís changed the charged atmosphere between SEDUE and the community groups. [46][47], Despite warnings and predictions, in 2005, an estimated 32 million people live in the high-risk lakebed area. [4], On the bed of the historic lake, the prevailing silt and volcanic clay sediments amplify seismic shaking. He actively integrated Tlateloloco citizen groups into a new program meant for that area, defusing the most volatile area of the city. Photo Mehmet Celebi, USGS. [34] People became trapped in stairwells, elevators and their apartments without any way to contact the outside world. Two reasons are the resonance in the lakebed sediments and the long duration of the shaking. The complete seismic event consisted of four quakes. Despite the loss of 5,000 hospital beds, there was never a shortage of facilities for the injured. Some fishing boats were reported missing but these reports were never confirmed. ↵ Alan Riding, “A year after the quake, Mexico City Is on the mend,” The New York Times (New York City, NY), September 20, 1986. Mexico City is on a plateau surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. [4], Shockwaves from the earthquake hit the mouth of the Río Balsas on the coast at 7:17 am and hit Mexico City, 350 km (220 mi) away, two minutes later at 7:19 am. [11][19], However, the death toll was great enough to require the use of the IMSS baseball field as a morgue, using ice to conserve bodies for identification. [12] The 19 September quake was a multiple event with two epicenters and the second movement occurring 26 seconds after the first. "Mexico City earthquake" redirects here. One of the more famous images of the event was the live broadcast of Hoy Mismo, a news program in the Televisa television network, when the earthquake struck. ↵ Daniel Hernandez, “The 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, Remembered,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 2010. Things got worse through February 1986, mostly due to the ineffectiveness of SEDUE and PRHP. It had 102 buildings with seven medical facilities, twenty-two schools and about 500 small businesses, serving the 80,000 people who lived there. The reason these stations were closed was not due to damage to the Metro proper, but rather because of surface rescue work and clearing of debris. 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