MEXICO is hit by another terrible earthquake with the magnitude of 7.1 on Tuesday that killed at least 225 people. Almost half of them died in the capital. It has been 32 years since the devastating 1985 quake. The disaster came as Mexico was still reeling from a powerful tremor that killed nearly 100 people in the south of the country less than two weeks ago. Right after the Mexico attack, an undersea earthquake with a magnitude of 6.1 struck in the remote Southern Ocean south of New Zealand on Wednesday. The quake, at a shallow depth of 10 km (6 miles), was recorded 211 km (140 miles) west of the sub-Antarctic Auckland Island, off New Zealand’s South Island.
The Mexico quake killed 86 people in the capital by early Wednesday morning, according to Civil Protection Chief, fewer than he had estimated earlier. In Morelos State, just to the south, 71 people died, with hundreds of homes destroyed. In Puebla at least 43 died. While the United States Geological Survey claimed on Tuesday that 11 aftershocks were registered following the initial quake at around lunch time on Tuesday, the most powerful measuring 4.9. The temblors were less frequent and smaller than those after the earthquake in Southern Mexico this month.
Among the twisted concrete and steel ruin of the Enrique Rebsamen school, soldiers and firefighters found the bodies of at least 22 children and two adults, while another 30 children and 12 adults were missing, President Enrique Pena Nieto said. The school is for children aged 3 to 14. Hundreds of emergency workers spent the night pulling rubble from the ruins of the grade school with their bare hands under the glare of floodlights. Three survivors were found at around midnight as volunteer rescue teams known as ‘moles’ crawled deep under the rubble.
Some volunteers in Mexico City expressed frustration at the disorganisation among military and civilian emergency services, which competed over who would lead the rescue efforts. ‘There is so much bureaucracy and so many obstacles in the way of getting these kids out alive,’ said Alfredo Perez, 52, a freelance civil engineer, who arrived at the Enrique Rebsamen school in the early hours of the morning to help. With power out in much of the city, the work was carried out with flashlights and generators.
So many occurrences of natural calamities such as earthquakes, hurricane, storms, flood these days as predicted by many forecasters and astrologers. We have out done our ancestors with our evil deeds. We are cutting down trees, killing animals, polluting environment; it seems nothing is safe from us. We are taxing the nature in many a ways threatening the very existence of the fona-flora and destroying the natural equilibrium by polluting the air, water, earth and what not? It won’t be too wrong if we say nature is taking revenge on us for our injustice and unkindness to mother earth.
