Mexico City – For Mexico City, Hurricane Katrina had strong
echoes of the earthquake 20 years ago that toppled buildings, hit
the poor hardest and shook Mexicans’ faith in government.
The skyline is soaring as the capital marks the 20th anniversary
Monday of the earthquake that killed at least 9,500 people and
leveled whole sections of the city. But some scars are still
visible and scientists say the city may be unprepared for the next
quake.
“That the poor were the ones that couldn’t evacuate (from New
Orleans) is something that caught our attention,” said Luis
Wintergerst, the city’s director of civil protection. The 1985
quake also hit the poor hardest, he said.
In the quake’s aftermath, civic and neighborhood groups sprang
to the rescue, disgusted with the government’s weak response. They
gave birth to a spirit of grass-roots involvement in public life
and politics that remains a source of national pride.
Araceli Santamaria, born the day before the quake and pulled
from the rubble of a collapsed hospital, has no doubt about how
people will respond to another disaster.
“Are people ready? Morally, yes,” said Santamaria, a college
student whose education is subsidized by a trust from foreign
donors dedicated to 13 surviving “miracle babies” pulled by
volunteers from two collapsed hospitals.
Mexican authorities don’t have the personnel or enough training
to deal with another 1985-magnitude quake, and ordinary people may
have no choice but to pitch in, said Roberto Hernandez, president
of Topos Mexico, or Mexico Moles, a search-and-rescue group.
Organized by young people to dig through the rubble of 1985, it
still exists, ready to pitch in if disaster strikes again.
after Hurricane Katrina but never got a response. However,
Mexican Army troops traveled to U.S. soil for the first time in 159
years to help care for hurricane victims, and a Mexican navy ship
sailed to the Mississippi coast to help.
Lying in a flood- and earthquake-prone valley, Mexico City has
rebuilt itself more than once since the Spanish arrived in the 16th
century. Flooded in 1629, it remained under water for nearly three
years. While the Spanish fled their homes, more than 30,000 Indians
died.
Today, high-rises have sprouted on the city’s western outskirts,
and the historic center is recovering some of its 1950s splendor
with the addition of a high-rise hotel, foreign ministry
headquarters, a courthouse and luxury apartments.
The capital’s high-tech skyscrapers include the 55-story Torre
Mayor, Latin America’s tallest, with a foundation 280 feet below
ground and 98 giant quake absorbers.
Julieta Guadalupe, 29, remembers the floor moving and the walls
cracking on the morning of Sept. 19, 1985, before her family
abandoned a teetering building.
She is still in a camp built for earthquake refugees on an
abandoned lot, sharing a one-room tin-and-asbestos shack with her
husband and two daughters. Other inhabitants long ago moved to
permanent city-built apartments, but they are too small to
accommodate offspring families like Guadalupe’s.
“I’m hoping they build here soon,” she said. “The room is
very small.”
Even now, Mexico City hasn’t entirely cleaned up. In the Roma
neighborhood, condemned buildings and rubble fill gaps between
townhouses left intact. On Chihuahua Street, squatters and dogs
live on a pile of twisted steel and concrete that once housed
offices of Mexico’s state oil monopoly.
“We came here because we don’t have anywhere else to live,”
said Carlos Chavez, 36, who washes car windshields for spare
change.
Rodolfo de la Torre, an expert on poverty at the Iberoamerican
University in Mexico City, said the earthquake helped clear out
derelict buildings and replace them with sturdier ones. But
although building codes were tightened, enforcement is bedeviled by
corruption .
And as the poor multiply, they are moving into illegal
structures on quake-prone land.
The problem with earthquakes is that no one can be sure where
it’s dangerous to build, said de la Torre. “Earthquakes not only
generate tragedy but also information,” he said. The answers “may
have to be revealed through another earthquake.”
