Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [7]
On Thursday, September 19, the morning the earthquake wrecked Mexico City, I was working in New York on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television documentary about a handful of Russian soldiers who had defected in Afghanistan and escaped to the United States. By the time the first shockwave (magnitude 8 on the Richter scale) hit the Mexican capital at 7:19 a.m. local time, the CBC camera crew and I had already left our Manhattan hotel. The front page of the New York Times carried stories about an American hostage in Lebanon freed after sixteen months of captivity and a feature about police corruption in Philadelphia but nothing about Mexico City, of course, because the paper had gone to bed the night before.
Off to a good start on the Soviet defector story, I worked my way through the first full day of Mexico’s tragedy without hearing a word about it. I was focused on “Russia’s Vietnam,” blissfully unaware of the mounting death toll in that smoky, flickering cauldron more than 1,800 miles (3,000 km) to the south and west. I did not know about heroic efforts underway to tunnel beneath the buckled walls and floors of a hospital to find survivors. I could not see the heartbreaking pictures my friend Robb was shooting at that very moment.
Even had I heard a radio newscast as we rattled over potholes and lurched back into New York just before midnight, the Mexico City story probably would not have fazed me as much as it should have. I had never experienced a disaster like that myself, so I had no effective way to process the information, no visceral sense of what it was like to feel the earth heave or to see the known world come crashing down around me. My awareness of distant tragedies was limited to a mental montage of anonymous, grieving widows, orphaned children crying, broken men with vacant stares, collapsed buildings, and body bags.
About a dozen years in television news and documentaries had sent me around the world more than once, but somehow I’d never been assigned to cover a natural disaster. An evolving cynic at the ripe old age of thirty-six, I had filed plenty of stories about human mayhem from places where the roads were mined and people tended to shoot at each other—places like Nicaragua and Honduras, Sri Lanka and the Punjab. But floods, typhoons, and earthquakes were terra incognita.
For me these doomsday stories had an air of unreality about them. The numbing repetition of so much tragedy, packaged neatly into twominute doses and delivered almost instantly by television news, blunted my reaction. Disaster shock tended to fade quickly.
I was ignorant not just of the people struggling to survive that night in the Mexican capital but of the scientific significance of the earthquake itself. I would not learn until weeks later that the “event” (as geologists would refer to it) had come as a bit of a surprise. The offshore fault that ruptured had been quiet for perhaps two hundred years even though smaller earthquakes had occurred on either side of the rupture zone.
The quiescence of the Michoacán segment, roughly 190 miles (300 km) southwest of Mexico City, had convinced some seismologists that this particular fragment of the earth’s crust was for reasons unknown a special case. Two tectonic plates were apparently sliding past each other smoothly. No stress, no worries.
Was there some kind of subterranean lubrication that kept the plates from getting jammed up? No one knew. But for as long as humans had kept written records, this zone and a few others like it around the world had not generated large, destructive earthquakes. Therefore, this particular stretch of the Mexican coast was thought to be aseismic—not likely to produce major earthquakes.
At sunset on Friday, September 20, Robb Douglas and his soundman Gunter Mende stood at the base of what might once have been a thirty-story apartment building but was now a twisted heap.