Mexico City: Earthquake 2 and My Aftermath

Big trucks sped down the avenue in front of my apartment last night. I know it because I woke up frantically at 3am as my building started to shake. It’s not abnormal for it to shake when big vehicles go by, but this time I couldn’t fall back asleep. My body is still in alert mode for another earthquake.

Weeks ago, when I felt the first earthquake shake the city, I had been asleep for 10 minutes when I woke to Luna barking beside my head and pawing and my arm draped over the side of the bed. As my mind drifted into full consciousness, I heard an alarm and panicked, thinking there was a fire. Just as I sat up, a second or less later, my bed started to sway back and forth like the top of a pine tree in a gust of wind. That’s when I knew it was an earthquake, but I didn’t know what to do. Omar was in Veracruz with his dad, and his cousin, my other roommate, was in Puebla for the month. Without thinking, I grabbed Luna and started for the door. The floor was rocking and it was hard to walk, so I held the wall with one hand and Luna with another. I heard glass breaking in the kitchen. We got to the door and when I opened it, the couple across the way who must be around 85 years old were covering their heads in their doorway. The woman was crying. I asked them what I should do? Should I run downstairs? They said it was safer to stay where I was under the doorway, that stairs are the least stable place in a building when it comes to its structure. So I huddled there with Luna on the verge of tears for much longer than the minute or so the building moved around us. The couple and I talked for awhile. They told me they had never felt an temblor that strong, not even in 1985. Before going inside, they assured me they would be right there if I needed anything. They knew I was alone and it was my first earthquake. Another girl came down the stairs from the roof. She told me it was safer up there, to go to the corner where there is the most structural support of the building since we were on the top (3rd) floor, and it was quick to get up there.

On the morning of September 19, 2017, Omar and I got up early to walk Luna before heading to the gym. At 10:45am, one of the employees came to tell me that in 15 minutes, we would be evacuating for an earthquake drill. At 11, we all slowly filed out onto the sidewalk. It didn’t seem very formal. We just walked out in no particular form or order, stayed there for 5 minutes, then went back in and continued to work out. I didn’t think much of it.

A little before 1:00pm, I had finished eating and went to my roof to hang my laundry out to dry. It was unusually sunny for the season, and the heat was beating down on Luna and I with an intensity I hadn’t felt in Mexico City for months. She was chewing on a bone and smiling. I was feeling fresh and alive after my workout, slowly hanging my clothes there in the sun. Then suddenly, I fell into the side of the cage where I was hanging my clothes. It felt like a sudden onset of vertigo, and I thought I was fainting. Then I fell completely to the opposite direction and onto the ground. That’s the moment I realized it was another earthquake, this time much stronger than the last. The building was not only swaying, it was shaking hard. Without thinking, I got up, grabbed Luna, and took her to the corner of the building. As we wobbled over there, a large antenna that was standing over the cage where I hung my clothes snapped in half and landed on the top of the cage. Luna and I moved to the corner and I squatted down to hold her. She was shaking. Then another girl ran up and joined us, almost crying. We could see people down below screaming rushing out of buildings onto the big avenue where traffic was halted. I heard some crashing that sounded like concrete. I saw a construction worker on an adjacent roof holding on for his life as the scaffolding he had climbed onto swayed hard back and forth. It felt like it went on for over a minute, but it was hard to tell amidst the panic I felt. Omar was downstairs in our apartment. I wondered where he was and what was happening to him. My eyes watched as more and more people poured into the street. Then finally, the movement—the shaking and rocking—it finally stopped. My heart was racing. I stood up and looked around. I couldn’t see anything in front of me that was too damaged. I thought maybe it was ok, like last time.

[snapped antenna]

[1:25pm, right after the earthquake. view from my roof.]

Luna and I ran downstairs to see Omar. He had grabbed the laptops and was about to run, but he just stayed instead, also unsure of what to do. We hugged for a long time, then tried to contact our parents, but there was no service and our power was out. It took about 10 minutes until we had some cellphone service, and I called my parents and told them briefly what happened. They of course hadn’t heard anything about it yet, but told us we should get out of the building. We not very quickly packed a couple of backpacks and went out to the streets, unsure of what we should be doing. Right before we left, Omar told me he read that a building was down in the neighborhood next to ours, La Condesa, less than a mile away. We heard that it was a 7.1 magnitude quake with an epicenter in nearby Puebla.

My heart sank as we walked to a plaza where there was a lot of open space, where it seemed like it could be safe. The streets of Roma Norte, where we live, were packed. On our way to the plaza, we saw concrete fallen from buildings around the corner, street lamps tilting way to the side. The plaza was also packed. Everything was already shut down, the stores, the restaurants, everything. Traffic was the worst I’ve ever seen it on every single street. Sirens sounded without end. Cellphone service was in and out, everyone checking over and over to let others know they were ok, to see if their own loved ones were ok, and to see the state of the city. Ambulances and firetrucks struggled to get through the roads that were completely jammed. As we walked past an ornate old church with yellow tape around it, I saw parts of it had fallen, huge slabs of concrete scattered on the sidewalk inside the tape. Two men quickly carried a woman on a stretcher on foot through the traffic right in front of me. We didn’t know where to go or what to do. We went to another plaza that might be less packed. It wasn’t. There, Omar’s mom finally got ahold of us, telling us his brother and cousin were in another plaza a bit further away, but we should go meet them there. So we did. On the way, the damage was unreal. Tall, brick apartment buildings were cracked down the middle and leaning heavily to one side. Windows were broken and glass covered the streets. Streets with whole buildings down were closed so we had to navigate around them. People were in a panic everywhere. It was a state of emergency I had never witnessed in my life. Luna could feel the energy and was tense. Omar and I stayed close to each other.

Plaza Cibeles, where we met Omar’s brother with his husband and his cousin with his girlfriend, was also crowded with people. No one knew what to do or where to go. Trucks and busses passed asking for volunteers to come help. Help with what? Dig people out of the rubble of fallen buildings. We didn’t know it at the time, but a school in another neighborhood collapsed and children and teachers were trapped inside, along with around 40 other buildings down, with possible people trapped in those as well. Others walked around handing out beverages to those of us sitting in the plaza waiting to hear what to do next, not that anyone was going to tell us. Still, we waited.

At some point, people started moving, so we walked to his brother’s nearby apartment in La Condesa. It was another difficult walk, seeing the city in shambles, panic, and despair. Hospitals poured out onto the streets, with sections blocked off by yellow tape for the excess beds of injured victims. His brother’s apartment was ok, no damage, but no power. We sat by candlelight talking a little bit but mostly in silence until we went to sleep.

Walking back to our apartment in the morning, the difference was that more streets were blocked off and disorganized crowds of people stood around wanting to help. There were helpers everywhere for sure. Some restaurants giving away free food, posting their wifi publicly, advertising their bathrooms were free for anyone to use. Regular people were there clearing away rubble where they could. A friend of Omar’s was out in the street in front of his building that was taped off and leaning against the building next to it, clearly no longer livable. Just like that, he no longer had an apartment.

It was a hard day. Our power was back, and so we could see over the internet the full extent of the damages outside of our neighborhood, which had already my soul sinking into a canyon of melancholy. I was supposed to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. So many people were dead. So much of the city was destroyed. How I was left feeling about that is a more political story for another post, but let me just say that knowing the corruption that exists in this city and this country, it was clear that proper assessment and building codes had far too often not been followed after the horrendous tragedy of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. If it had, the extent of the damage would not have been so great.

How eerie is it that the earthquake drill earlier in the day before the earthquake was because it was the anniversary of the 1985 earthquake? September 19, 1985. Thirty-two years later, on the same day, this earthquake happened. Is that some grand coincidence? What are the odds?

As the trucks kept whizzing by, shaking my building and rattling my mind, my blood was buzzing. I tried not to look at my phone, but after an hour of not being able to sleep, lying there with my eyes closed bracing myself when I heard a truck pass, I couldn’t help myself. On Facebook, my friend had tagged me in a post about the different kinds of cracks on buildings and what they mean. I had sent her pictures of the outside of my apartment building earlier, showing some cracks that looked minor. I couldn’t even tell if they had been there before, that’s how minor. Still, when I read the post she had tagged me in, I started freaking out. One of the photos showed cracks that I thought looked identical to cracks that were on my building, and the post said those cracks were dangerous, that the building may have sustained heavy structural damages. If I was already on the edge of my nerves before, after seeing that, I started weeping. I woke up Omar and told him what I had just read. I also told him that after another hour of careful analysis and mind racing, l realized that while the cracks in that post looked the same as the ones on my building, those were on columns and mine were on the concrete frames around the exterior of the windows. Not the same. Even concluding that the cracks didn’t actually match, what did I know? Also, who made that post on Facebook about the cracks? What do they know? Was I reacting to something real that could save my life or sensationalist social media antics? I didn’t and couldn’t know.

[cracks in columns: structural damage=risk of collapse]

[my building]

That’s when I started thinking that every building has a life. Let’s say the strongest possible building can withstand fifty 8.0 earthquakes or higher before it falls. Every building will eventually fall if the earth moves enough, right? So how many would it take before mine fell? Was it build before or after 1985? Were the cracks serious? Is there such a thing as unserious cracks in a building? It didn’t seem like my building would fall yet, that it at least had a few more before it would become dangerous, but let me tell you something. When you are in bed at 5am the day after an earthquake collapsed over 40 buildings in your city, your city that mind you was built on a lake bed, making it entire foundation structurally unsound, seem is not a word you want to be dealing with when you’re wondering if the cracks on your building are an indication of either superficial or structural damage.

I woke up this morning from a dream that I was peeing when another earthquake hit, and I heard things crashing all around inside the apartment. I tried to get my pants up, but for some reason I couldn’t. To the door of the bathroom I went without them, but the door was stuck and Omar was yelling from the outside trying to get me out. Then i woke up to another day. Life goes on, you know? But it’s also true that everything that happens is from now on. I guess I will never go back to the me that there was before September 19, 2017, that earthquake. After time has passed, and the window of aftershocks has passed, and I begin to normalize, not startled and jumpy from trucks going by, not sustaining a deep sense of panic, there will be a wisdom and strength in me that wasn’t there before. That moment has not arrived yet, however, so as I sit here on my couch, I have been turning my shoulder involuntarily to look out the window every time a truck goes by rattling my world instead of just my building.

And that's just me. I can't even imagine the horror to those who have been affected physically instead of just psychologically. It's a sad month in Mexico City.