Momentous times. As Hurricane Maria, right on the heels of Irma, smashed
its way past Dominica and toward Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean, on
Tuesday, the inhabitants of Mexico City were reeling from the terrifying
shock of a 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck in the early afternoon.
By Wednesday morning, more than two hundred deaths had been
reported in Mexico City and in the nearby cities of Morelos and Puebla. Dozens of
buildings had collapsed in the capital, while many, many more were
damaged, and their occupants evacuated. Amid panic and chaos, people
crowded into the streets, while plumes of dust rose from teetering
structures across the city.

There were several bitter coincidences about Tuesday’s earthquake. It struck
just a couple of hours after Mexico City’s residents participated in an
earthquake-preparedness drill, and on the thirty-second anniversary of
the terrible 1985 earthquake that killed at least ten thousand people.
And it came just twelve days after another powerful earthquake—the
strongest to hit Mexico in a century, measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale
and lasting nearly four minutes—had rocked the city. That quake had
caused widespread damage and killed at least ninety-six people in states
south of Mexico City—Oaxaca and Chiapas—but no one died in the capital
itself. The difference in the effects had to do with the locations of
the epicenters. The September 7th quake had its epicenter some five
hundred miles away from Mexico City; Tuesday’s was only a hundred miles
distant.

Within minutes of this latest quake, images and videos began circulating
on social media. Some showed fearful people in the street holding one
another and weeping. Others showed people running away from buildings as
they imploded and toppled over, and, before long, rescue crews trying to
tunnel into concrete to rescue trapped people.

Few experiences are more terrifying than being caught inside a tall
building during a major earthquake. There is little you can to do to
save yourself until it is over.

As I write this article, I am in New York City, but I have lately been
coming and going from Mexico City for work. When the September 7th quake
hit, I was there, staying with my friends Francisco Goldman, a novelist
and contributor to The New Yorker, and his wife, Jhoana Montes. They
live in an apartment on the sixth floor of a ten-story concrete tower in
Colonia Roma, a lovely district built on shaky ground.

When that quake struck, just before midnight, I was asleep, but as the
building began shifting and groaning, and household objects fell to the
floor, I awoke and ran to the living room, where I found Francisco and
Jhoana standing together in the open door of the apartment. The entire
building was swaying and twisting; there were bangs and noises; people
called out in alarm. A large metal-framed mirror in the hallway swung
violently back and forth. Other residents were evacuating, but Francisco
was incapable of negotiating so many flights of stairs—he’d had knee
surgery the previous day, and he was on crutches. As the shaking went
on, and on, we clung to one another and trembled involuntarily. At one
point, I felt fairly certain that the building would collapse.

Once the tremors stopped—mercifully—we made our way slowly down together
to the park outside the building, where many of the neighbors had
gathered. After about two hours, we decided (one just decides these
things, there is no science to it) that there would probably be no major
aftershocks, and we slowly made our way back up to the apartment. The next morning, in daylight, we inspected the damage: plaster and
chunks of drywall and tiling scattered here and there, vertical cracks
in the corners of almost every room. The building’s elevator was
unusable.

On Tuesday, Francisco and Jhoana were in the apartment when the latest
quake struck. Their neighborhood was among the hardest hit in the city,
and the shaking was much more violent than it had been during the
September 7th quake. The glass in many of the building’s windows
exploded. Francisco, Jhoana, and their neighbors found themselves back
in the park. This time, however, the damage was so bad that the building
was cordoned off and its residents were not allowed back in. In a Whatsapp
message, Francisco remarked on being suddenly homeless. “I pray for the
people of this city,” he wrote. (Fortunately, he and Jhoana were taken in by friends who live nearby, in
a building that was not damaged.)

The images of rescuers tunnelling into the concrete slabs of pancaked
buildings—one that fell just a couple of blocks from where Francisco and
Jhoana live was a public school—brought back memories of the 1985
earthquake. I was living in El Salvador at the time, and flew to the
city as soon as I heard the news, to report on the aftermath. I arrived
about twelve hours after the earthquake hit. Night had fallen by then,
and it was difficult to see the damage. It wasn’t until dawn that I was
able to venture out on foot to really see what had happened. I was in an
area adjacent to Colonia Roma, in the so-called Zona Rosa area of hotels
and restaurants, just off the city’s great boulevard, Reforma Avenue.
Among the first things I saw was a little girl, perhaps five years old,
lying dead in the middle of the avenue. Several people were standing
around her, and one covered her with a sheet. Everyone was mute. I
walked on, and about two blocks away, I encountered a five-story
building that had collapsed. Each story’s concrete slab had met with the
one beneath it, squishing everything in between, and the entire
structure had come to rest on a man’s head.

Over the next two weeks, I spent many hours at the collapsed buildings,
where the search for survivors went on around the clock. Many public
schools and hospitals had come down, with children and patients inside
them, and the anger in the city grew as it became clear that the corrupt
government contractors who had built the structures had skimped on
materials. The stench of death was everywhere, and so were the
disconsolate relatives of the missing, who waited like wraiths, holding
out hope for miracles. All of us gathered to watch as the rescuers known
as “los topos,” or human moles—truly heroic figures—burrowed deep into
the ruins, at great peril to their own lives. As the days passed and the
survivors became fewer and fewer, despair and sadness set in across the
city. In some cases, the topos wept as they emerged from buildings.
Most were too traumatized to speak, but some whispered of the horrors
they had seen inside—people trapped, dying, people whose limbs they had
had to cut off in order to save them, and, the most haunting of all,
those people whose cries they could hear but whom they could not get to. Everyone
cheered and wept when the topos were successful and brought forth a
child, a man, a woman, who, against all the odds, had managed to stay
alive.

The most recent earthquake was, thankfully, not as bad as 1985. Building standards have
been greatly improved since those days. Even so, some public buildings
came down, including one primary school with children still inside it.
At least twenty-two children are known to have died, and more are
missing. On Tuesday, as the searches went on around the city, people from every walk
of life pitched in on the clean-up and rescue efforts, while others
offered their homes to those left homeless. “I’ve been helping in a
collapsed building,” the writer Brenda Lozano told me. “These human
chains are one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced, and
also one of the hardest to bear. Sadly, the bodies keep coming out.”
Once again, the inhabitants of Mexico City have been shaken to their
core. It is a fearsome reminder of the precariousness of everything, and
of life itself, for the people of that great city.