TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capts.14

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                                                                                September 30, 1985

WORLD

"A Noise Like Thunder"


Mexico City is battered by devastating tremors, with heavy loss
of life


Dawn broke with clarity. Even the encircling, snow-topped
Sierra Madre was etched sharply in the distance against an azure
sky. This was unusual for Mexico City, which is normally
shrouded in a brown smog generated by the exhausts of some 3
million cars. But in just four earthshaking minutes, starting
at 7:18 a.m. last Thursday, the day's auspicious beginning
turned into a nightmarish disaster--and the bright skies only
illuminated the extent of the tragedy.

"The noise was like thunder," recalled Tito Garcia Mendez, 60,
who was riding the city's sleek subway, one of the capital's
brightest successes. "All the lights went out. People began
screaming. I felt dizzy. I thought it was because I was
hungry."  Fernando Levaro, 21, a medical student, was driving
to an earlier class. "My car began swinging from one side of
the road to the other. I could see lampposts and buildings
swaying. People began to run, but they didn't know where to go.
It was terrible."  Arturo Cholula, 40, was getting dressed for
his day's duty as a navy ensign. "I started to fall, and my
closet came toward me. I felt like a drunk."

A devastating earthquake had hit Mexico City. The quake's
force, measured at 7.8 on the Richter scale, was the world's
most severe since a tremor measuring 7.8 struck the coast of
Chile last March. In four chaotic minutes, an estimated 250
buildings collapsed in downtown Mexico City; 50 more were later
judged dangerously close to falling, and the condition of 1,000
others were regarded as unsafe.

At week's end at least 2,000 people were believed to have died,
more than 5,000 were injured, and thousands were missing. As
rescue workers, all too often digging into the rubble with hand
tools, responded to faint cries for help and unearthed ever more
bodies, the death toll rose hourly. U.S. Ambassador John Gavin,
who flew over the devastation in a helicopter, predicted that
some 10,000, perhaps even double that number, would eventually
be found dead or trapped in the ruins. Said he:  "It looked as
if a giant foot had stepped on the buildings."

Even as the massive rescue effort was under way, the capital
was struck another blow. Just 36 hours after the first temblor,
a second quake, though not as powerful as the first, battered
Mexico City. This tremor, lasting for at least a minute,
toppled some already weakened buildings but caused few new
injuries. Mainly, it made the rubble bounce and rekindled fear
among the city's residents, thousands of whom had spent the
night in parks and other open spaces. President Miguel de la
Madrid Hurtado took note of the "panic" provoked by the second
shock, but assured Mexicans that "the damage was much less than
the first."  Earlier, in appealing for calm, he had told his
countrymen that "we are living through a great tragedy that
affects all Mexicans."

Given the initial communications void, there was no way of
knowing how many casualties had occurred in Mexico's rural
areas. But scattered damage was reported from the coastal
states of Colima, Guerrero, Jalisco and Michoacan. These were
close to the epicenter, which geologists located offshore near
the border between Michoacan and Guerrero, some 200 miles
southwest to Mexico City. Fortunately, the affected states are
sparsely populated, and their rocky underpinnings provided some
resistance to the tremors. Still, at least 150 people were
reported killed in Jalisco and 30 in Michoacan, where two hotels
were leveled at the resort of Playa Azul. The toll along the
coast, too, seemed certain to rise.

The strength of the quake set skyscrapers to swaying as far
north as Houston, 1,100 miles from the epicenter. A 2-ft. tidal
wave rolled ashore on the coast of El Salvador, more than 800
miles to the southeast. Hawaii, 3,500 miles west of the quake
in the Pacific, was alerted to prepare for an ocean swell known
as a tsunami, but it never materialized.

The widespread scare was a chilling reminder that the world's
well- defined quake-prone areas can be struck at any time,
without warning, and with deadly effect. The same region in
which last week's two quakes occurred had generated six temblors
with a magnitude of at least 70 since 1911. Thus the latest
shocks came as no surprise to seismologists, although the timing
could not be pinpointed in advance. Californians living near
the dangerous San Andreas Fault could only wonder when San
Francisco or Los Angeles, long tagged as likely quake targets,
might share Mexico City's fate.

In striking the Mexican capital, the killer quake could not
have chosen a more vulnerable target. Mexico City is at the
heard of the world's most populous metropolitan area. Some 18
million people, a fourth of the nation's inhabitants, are jammed
into a mere 890 sq. mi., or roughly 1% of the predominantly
rural country's land area. By one estimate, nearly a third of
all families in Mexico City huddle together in a single
room--and the average family has five members.

Beyond the human density, the capital has a shaky geological
base that makes it especially susceptible to earthquakes.
Mexico City is built on the soft, moist sediment of an ancient
lake bed; when jolted, says Caltech Earthquake Expert George W.
Housner, it reacts "like a bowl of jelly."  The city has, in
fact, been sinking into its soft base at up to 10 in. annually.
The drop has been uneven, creating a tilt in some foundations,
thus placing those buildings at greater peril than others when
the earth begins to rumble.

The morning rush hour was well under way in Mexico City when
the earth began to heave. Up to a half a million residents
crowded the Metro, bound for work or for classes. A few schools
were already open, and the inevitable morning traffic jam was
slowing movement on the streets, even on the tree-lined,
eight-lane Paseo de la Reforma, the grand boulevard that extends
through the center of the city.

While the fashionable boutiques and crafts shops along the
nearby Avenida Juarez were not to open for several hours,
interns had started making their rounds in a complex of
hospitals within the National Medical Center. It was a bit
early for much activity in the wealthy northwestern and southern
neighborhoods, where hacienda-style houses sit next to
modernistic concrete-and-glass homes. But life begins early
each day in the overcrowded shantytowns at the edge of the
sprawling city, where unemployment stands at 12% and
underemployment is estimated at 40%.

At the Continental Hotel, on the Reforma, Eva Hernandez, a
Costa Rican tourist, was staying in Room 930. "It started to
shake," she said. "We ran out of the room. We ran down the
stairs and we ran and ran. The building was falling all around
us. Rocks were falling on us. My roommate fell and her pajamas
were torn off, but we kept on running. Now there is nothing
there, where we were. Nothing."  The hotel's top two floors had
collapsed, spewing debris onto the boulevard below.

Maricela Alcaraz, 22, was at breakfast with her mother and two
younger brothers in their apartment on the south side of the
city. The lamp above the kitchen table began swinging back and
forth, casting strange shadows on undulating walls. "Oh my
God!"  Maricela shouted. Her mother jumped up, ordered the
children to go into a bedroom and stay together. They could
hear doors banging as the building trembled. "The whole world
was shaking," Maricela recalled.

Bertoldo Garcia Cruz, a car mechanic, had just taken his son to
Public School No. 3 on Avenida Chapultepec. "We were in the
school's main office when everything around us, four floors,
went down. I helped take out four bodies, mutilated, all
14-year-olds. I took one out who was injured, but maybe he'll
live."

Jose Saltiel, 56, was shaving in his two-story house in Las
Lomas when "the ground started shaking and the bathroom appeared
to be swirling."  He grabbed his son and stood in a doorway.
He later went to his office, but, he said, "I was scared. I
thought a bomb had been dropped."

TIME Reporter Andrea Dabrowski was pouring coffee in the kitchen
of her apartment in the center of the capital. "I thought I was
sick," she said. "There was this terrible dizzy feeling. Some
way, I stumbled to the doorway. The buildings across the street
were swaying, really swaying. It was like being rocked in a
boat. There were all these sounds of cracking and crackling,
and the electric lines popping. I yelled out, 'God save me!'"

The quake knocked many of the city's radio and television
stations off the air. One exception was Channel 13, which
provided the world with the first images of the disaster. A
young man who did not give his name tearfully told a Channel 13
interviewer that he heard "a tremendous noise, and I grabbed my
daughter and jumped out the window of my apartment.  Everything
was being twisted. I was trapped in the ruins with my daughter,
but we were rescued. I had no chance to help my wife, who was
killed when she was buried by the rubble."

Les Connolly, 43, an account executive for Goodyear Tire &
Rubber Co. in Birmingham, Mich., was staying on the tenth floor
of the Maria Isabel Sheraton. "The building swayed five or six
feet each way. We were holding on to the walls as it went. It
would go all the way one way and you'd think it was going over
and you'd be dead. Then the next time it would sway all the way
the other way and you'd think this time it would crash. Finally
it righted itself, and we all ran out on the street."  There
Connolly saw "people without clothes, wrapped in towels, and
crying. It was a horrible experience."

A visiting British couple, John Meeus and his wife, spoke of
the quake with British understatement. They were staying at the
Galeria Plaza Hotel in the Zona Rosa neighborhood, Mexico City's
popular tourist area. "I was having a cup of coffee in bed when
my hand and the cup started shaking," Meeus said. "I looked out
of the window and saw a building collapse. I turned to my wife
and said, 'I think we've got a slight earth tremor.'"

At the National Medical Center along Cuauhtemoc Avenue, eight
of the nine buildings that are part of the complex were
seriously damaged. Ambulances were waved away. Many already
seriously ill patients had to be evacuated to other facilities,
along with the newly injured.

Nurses gathered outside the remains of the seven-story
gynecology- obstetrics wing of General Hospital. "There were
44 beds per floor and 44 cribs," sobbed one. "I had just walked
out of there, off the night shift. My friends..."  She could
not continue. There were no known survivors among the 250
people, patients and staff who were thought to have been in the
building when it collapsed.

At an adjacent dormitory for medical residents, the bodies of
ten doctors were pulled from the debris. As rescue workers
scrambled over the wreckage, carrying picks and ropes, one
suddenly shouted, "Silence!"  He had heard sounds of life. "We
are here," said a muffled voice. The workers quickly lowered
an oxygen hose into a tiny crevice to keep the survivors alive.
On Avenida Juarez, a state technical school, with an enrollment
of 300 teenage students, was leveled. Outside, a red-eyed
teacher sat in the middle of the closed-off street typing a list
of the missing.

Part of the city's largest public housing project, Tlatelolco,
was reduced to what a local paper called "a collective tomb."
With thousands of families living in about 40 buildings, the
final death toll at Tlatelolco was still uncertain by week's
end, but it was assumed to be high. All that was left of one
of the project's high- rises, the 13-story Nuevo Leon, was a
100-ft.-high pile of concrete and reinforcing bars. With at
least 40 occupants found dead and 230 counted as injured,
officials feared that 1,500 remained trapped, alive or dead, in
the ruins. Volunteers formed lines to pass chunks of concrete,
hand to hand, down from the mountain of rubble in the effort to
find survivors. When a young boy was pulled out of the crush
of concrete--bloody and bruised, but not seriously hurt--
rescuers and bystanders broke into cheers.

Some of the city's older hotels became casualties. The Regis,
just off the Reforma, collapsed on itself; also hard hit were
the Diplomatico, the De Carlo, the Versalles, the Montreal and
the Principado. About six others reported less severe damage.
At least ten major government buildings were affected,
including the ministries of marine, labor and commerce, as well
as the complex housing the state-owned Telefonos de Mexico. The
destruction of government offices did not distress a cynical
cabdriver, who commented, "Maybe there is a God."

Miraculously, only three Americans were reported to have been
killed by week's end. More than 130,000 Americans are permanent
residents of the capital; some 4,500 U.S. tourists were believed
to have been in Mexico City at the time the quake struck. Many
of the visitors tried to head home as quickly as possible. With
communications and airline schedules disrupted, that was easier
attempted than done.

For the rest of the world, aware of the quake but uncertain as
to its impact, the disruption of communications caused in part
by the collapse of Mexico City's main transmission tower
prolonged the suspense. Only TV-13 provided information, and
only to those who were fortunate enough to still have
electricity; sections of the city were without power. A station
in Bogota, Colombia, was able to monitor the Mexican channel's
transmissions via satellite, and relayed the highlights to the
outside world. International telephone and telex circuits were
down and, as during the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, the
first on-the-spot accounts came from amateur radio operators.
Using battery-powered equipment, a handful of Mexico City hams
described the devastation to their counterparts in the U.S. The
American operators, in turn, were able to help some of the
thousands of U.S. citizens and residents with relatives in
Mexico find out whether their kinfolk had survived. The U.S.
State Department at first was able to communicate with its
Mexico City embassy only by radio. Later, special telephone
lines were established. The embassy, a massive modern building
on the Reforma, was not damaged.

Runways at Mexico City's Benito Juarez airport were largely
intact, but flights into the stricken capital were halted for
a while as officials checked for damage. By nightfall, Mexican
airlines and most U.S. carriers resumed service. Some of the
initial eyewitness accounts of the tragedy came from travelers
on the first flights out.

Clearly, the first priority in the capital was to find and
rescue survivors. Some 10,000 troops were deployed in
quake-scarred areas to keep spectators away, prevent looting and
allow a quickly growing number of official and volunteer
rescuers to go about their task. They did so in a spirit of
solidarity, born of shared grief.

Hundreds of citizens flocked to medical clinics to donate
blood, while others contributed food, clothing and blankets and
offered shelter to the homeless. In the meantime the rescuers,
some wearing bright orange vests and blue face masks, labored
to trace cries for help amid twisted girders and broken blocks
of concrete. When rescuers found survivors, they passed them
in a human chain from the top of fallen buildings to the street
and into waiting ambulances.

The pall of smoke emanating from quake-caused fires first
darkened the morning sky, then dissipated. By early afternoon
an eerie silence, broken only by the wailing sirens of emergency
vehicles, had settled over the normally boisterous city. The
sun again broke through, casting a pink glow on crumbled
buildings, piles of debris, windowless facades. Outside the
remaining half of an apartment building on Calle Atenas, a man
in a beige suit sat motionless, as though any shift of his body
might dislodge more of the structure. "Please get me my
daughter, please get la chiquita," he whispered to the rescuers.
The girl was in the ruins. "Where is your wife?" someone
asked. "Oh, she already died," he replied.

Around a corner, several blocks of a street seemed untouched.
Nonetheless, a young man looked worriedly above him:  a
20-story building was leaning forward at an alarming angle.
Farther down the street, another building was titled backward,
while a third had a V- shaped bulge in its middle. No
pedestrian could feel safe below the damaged structures, yet
three shabbily dressed women sat nearby, sipping coffee out of
plastic cups. They said they were afraid to go back into their
homes since the walls might tumble around them.

As workers scraped at the wreckage of one building with
shovels, picks and even their bare hands, a middle-aged man in
a worn leather jacket watched anxiously. Two of his daughters
had died in his home's collapse. A rescuer waved his hand for
quiet:  a dog was barking in the rubble. One of the workers
reached into the debris and pulled out a white pup, trembling
and whining. "Senor," said the worker, handing the animal to
the grieving man. It was his dog. He cuddled it, trying to
ease his own sorrow in comforting the pup.

Outside the capital, the destruction appeared to be sporadic
and scattered. In Acapulco, the flashy Pacific resort town, the
tropical sun had just begun to burn through the coastal clouds
when the high- rise hotels that line the city's main avenue
began to sway. Panicked tourists, many in nightgowns and robes,
rushed into hotel lobbies. "I swear to God I thought my room was
going to split in half," said one visitor from Dallas at the
Hyatt Regency Excelaris. Hotel Worker Heriverto Flores was at
home eating breakfast with his wife. "Tremors are nothing new
to us," he said. "But this one was so hard we ran outside
because we thought the house would come down."

At the Acapulco Princess Hotel, Christina Acosta of Miami Beach
was celebrating her 24th birthday when she saw the wall of her
room "just crack straight down from the ceiling to the floor.
The noise was terrible. It was the longest minute and a half
of my life. I thought, 'This is it; I made it to 24 and now
it's all over.'"  When the rocking stopped, the damage was
surprisingly small, even though Acapulco was only 150 miles from
the epicenter. The radar at the city's airport was knocked out,
stranding travelers for a time, and there was no telephone
service.

Farther inland, at Atenquique, a town in Jalisco state, part of
a mountain, said a policeman, "just slid away," burying several
people. In nearby Ciudad Guzman, 25 people were killed as they
worshipped in a church that collapsed on them. Elsewhere, four
popular hotels in the hard-hit resort area of
Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa, on the Pacific coast, had to be evacuated
because of damage:  Riviera del Sol, El Presidente, Dorado
Pacifico and the Sheraton.

Along the Texas coast in East Galveston Bay, Hugh Brothers, 52,
a Houston pharmacist, was casting for flounder in shallow water.
"This swell came up from behind in the water. It didn't knock
me down, but it was extraordinary. I looked around and saw
there weren't any boats nearby, and I said, 'Where'd that come
from?'  Then everything was perfectly still."  On the 48th floor
of the 64-story Transco Tower in Houston, Martha Carlin saw
"water sloshing around in the coffee urns. Office doors were
closing, and the building was in motion. I looked out the
window at the trees and they were standing still, so I knew the
wind wasn't blowing."  The tremors were also felt in McAllen and
Brownsville, cities in the Rio Grande Valley along the
Texas-Mexico border.

Beyond the widespread anguish caused by the quake, there was
also deep concern in Mexico over the economic implications of
the disaster. Already burdened with severe economic problems
(see below), the nation was struck a savage blow. "There will
be an immense cost," predicted Clemente Ruiz Duran, an economist
and former official of Mexico's central bank. Reconstruction
must await the end of the effort to rescue survivors. While
cranes and heavy earthmoving equipment were scarce, federal and
municipal officials moved swiftly after the blow came. The
National Defense Secretariat activated a standing plan for just
such an emergency, mobilizing armed forces units not only to
prevent looting but to oversee rescue and repair activities.

The military operation began with the muster of several
thousand troops in Mexico City's Zocalo. About 600 motorcycle
troopers, able to dodge debris on otherwise closed streets,
fanned out for a quick survey of the extent of the catastrophe.
The army also made available 500 trucks to transport rescue
workers from one site to another. Patrolling troops warned
residents against lighting matches or smoking in neighborhoods
where gas lines had ruptured. Water and food supplies appeared
adequate, although distribution was far from normal. Even so,
many poor residents began filling plastic pails with water as
a precaution against possible shortages.

Following a personal inspection of some of the worst-hit parts
of the city, President de la Madrid declared a state of
emergency and proclaimed a three-day period of national
mourning. Ronald Reagan tried to reach De la Madrid by
telephone from Washington; like countless others in the U.S.,
the President was unable to get a connection. Instead, a
message from Reagan was relayed by radio to the U.S. embassy and
then delivered to De la Madrid. It offered U.S. condolences and
help. But Mexico, which has historically resisted outside
assistance following natural disasters, did not ask for aid.

A day later, Secretary of State George Shultz invited the
Mexican Ambassador, Jorge Espinosa de Los Reyes, to his office
to discuss the situation. Again, the U.S. offer of assistance
was, at least for the moment, politely turned down:  the
Ambassador noted that first of all, needs would have to be
assessed. Following the meeting, Shultz explained to reporters,
"Mexico likes traditionally to confront its problems itself.
We admire that. But Mexico should also know we are there, ready
to help."

Dramatizing that point, Reagan announced on Saturday that his
wife Nancy would go to Mexico City for a brief visit this week
"to express the support of the American people to our courageous
friends in Mexico."

Ambassador Gavin meantime told a press conference in Mexico
City that, with the Mexican government's approval, the U.S. was
sending 25 demolition experts to level 30 precariously weakened
buildings in the capital. They would arrive in Mexico City in
a C-5A transport also carrying five large helicopters equipped
to fight fires. An accompanying team of 25 civilian technicians
would include experts on disasters and on using heavy mining
equipment. One request the Mexicans did make was for giant
crane helicopters to help clear some of the ruins, but U.S.
experts said they would not operate properly at the city's
7,350-ft. altitude.

If Mexico does not ask for more extensive help from the U.S.
Government, American assistance will be funneled into the
country through private charities. Late last week a team of
experts from the American Red Cross flew to Mexico City to
advise on medical and communications problems, while the
International Red Cross dispatched specialists from Geneva to
survey Mexico's post-quake needs. All along, Mexico's own Red
Cross volunteers had participated in rescue efforts and helped
distribute emergency supplies.

For all the offers of outside assistance, the burden as well as
the suffering could, of course, be borne only by Mexico's
grieving millions. Yet amid all the pain and the anguish caused
by the great quake, Mexicans had reason to be proud of the way
in which they reacted to the disaster. One of the few uplifting
results of last week's tragedy was the determination with which
the military, civilian officials and thousands of volunteers
pitched in to the agonizing task of seeking signs of life among
the rubble and recovering the bodies of those who were beyond
help. "It was a very human response," said one of the
volunteers, a medical student named Guadalupe Ostos. "It makes
things easier."

--By Ed Magnuson.  Reported by Jonathan Beaty, David S. Jackson
and Harry Kelly/Mexico   City and Ricardo Chavira/Acapulco

--------------------------------------------------------- Worst
of the Century

The deadliest earthquakes in this century have occurred in the
Far East, Latin America and the Mediterranean. By far the most
lethal was a temblor that devastated the city of Tangshan,
China, in July 1976. While Peking later put the official death
toll at 242,000, other estimates ranged as high as 750,000. The
great San Francisco quake of 1906 was the most powerful in
modern U.S. history; the tremor and resulting fires resulted in
700 casualties--not enough to make the list. Nor will last
week's disaster in Mexico City, despite the heavy damage, unless
the death total reaches 30,000. The ten most destructive
quakes:

--------------------------------------------------     DATE
PLACE     DEATH TOLL     RICHTER

July 28, 1976     China       242,000        8.0 May 22, 1927
China       200,000        8.3 Dec. 16, 1920     China
180,000        8.6 Sept. 1, 1923     Japan        43,000
8.3 Dec. 28, 1908     Italy        75,000        7.5 Dec.
26, 1932     China        70,000        7.6 May 31, 1970
Peru         66,794        7.8 Jan. 24, 1939     Chile
30,000        8.3 May 31, 1935      India        30,000
7.5 Jan. 13, 1915     Italy        29,970        7.0
--------------------------------------------------


--------------------------------------------------------- The
Trials of Job

It will take weeks, perhaps months, to assess the financial toll
of last week's earthquakes. But most analysts of Mexican
affairs would agree that the disaster could not have come at a
worse time for the country's troubled economy. As Peter Bell,
a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, puts it, "Mexico has been going through
something like the trials of Job."

For more than two years, Mexicans have endured the imposition
of one austerity package after another. They have watched
government food subsidies shrink, unemployment rise, the value
of the peso sink (it slid to an all-time low last week of 372
to the U.S. dollar). Yet now, on top of such belt tightening,
Mexico City and four coastal states need major reconstruction
programs that will consume already tight reserves of capital.
"It is a tremendous psychological blow," says M. Delal Baer,
an expert on Mexico at Georgetown University's Center for
Strategic and International Studies. "You begin to feel that
the gods are conspiring against Mexico."

In the weeks ahead, Mexico may ask whether international bankers
and Saudi oilmen are conspiring as well. A little more than a
month ago, Mexico's Finance Ministry admitted that inflation was
running at 59% instead of the 35% prescribed by the
International Monetary Fund, and the budget deficit was about
8% of total economic output for 1985, instead of 3.5%. Since
Mexico has not met the fund's terms, it would normally not be
allowed to draw on a $900 million line of credit that remains
from a three-year $3.4 billion IMF loan. "We could never have
complied with that deficit requirement, even before this
tragedy,"  Mexican Economist Clemente Ruiz Duran said the day
after the first earthquake. "Now it's even less realistic."
The IMF may agree. Late last week the U.S. State Department
suggested that any suspension of IMF loans would "undoubtedly
be held in abeyance" until Mexico had a chance to assess the
economic consequences of the disaster.

Other lenders may not prove as flexible. Mexico, which ranks
second only to Brazil in the developing world as a debtor, is
saddled with a $96 billion foreign debt, of which $77.7 billion
was lent by a consortium of 300 international banks. Last month
most of those banks agreed to extend through the end of the
century Mexico's repayments on $48.7 billion of the total amount
due. About 30 banks, however, have yet to sign the accord, and
there are concerns among bankers that the impact of the great
quake may lead them to withhold their signatures even longer.
"Unless all banks sign,"says one U.S. financier, "the whole
package could come unstrung."  Moreover, Mexican officials
estimated last month that they would need about $3 billion in
new foreign loans in 1986 to keep economic growth at its current
rate of about 3% annually. Banks that were wary then are
certain to be even more hesitant in the wake of the tremors.

No less troubling for Mexico are indications that Saudi Arabia
is taking steps that could lower world oil prices. The
consequences would be enormous for Mexico, which draws 66% of
its export earnings from petroleum. Last week's devastation is
also certain to hurt Mexico's tourism industry, which provides
crucial foreign-exchange dollars to help service Mexico's dept.
Tourists are likely to stay away until normal conditions are
restored in Mexico City and the hard-hit coastal states;
accommodations will be tight until the many damaged hotels are
repaired or rebuilt. On the bright side, neither oil-refining
facilities nor heavy industrial complexes that are located in
the northern section of Mexico City appear to have been harmed
by the quakes.

President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado is scheduled to address
the U.N. General Assembly this week. If he is able to keep the
appointment, he will probably renew an appeal he made three
weeks ago during his annual state-of-the nation speech, when he
asked for a new round of negotiations to ease repayment
conditions. He can only hope that lenders will listen--and
respond favorably.


---------------------------------------------------------
Anatomy of an Earthquake

The 300-mile ribbon of Mexican Pacific coastline that stretches
from Manzanillo to Acapulco has long been considered one of the
world's beautiful places, home to a sprinkling of fishing
hamlets and resorts. Yet beneath the indigo waves and silky
white beaches lies a jagged fault line that could be one of the
deadliest in the Western Hemisphere. It was this fault that
erupted under the Pacific last week, causing the earthquake that
measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, rocked coastal towns and
brought disaster to Mexico City.

To scientists, the great quake and its aftershocks were not
surprising. Karen McNally, a geophysicist at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, had warned in 1981 that substantial
seismic activity was likely in the area. "Everything we had
seen," she says, "could not allow us to exclude the possibility
of a major earthquake."

In a seeming paradox, the location of last week's quake was
thought to be endangered because it had been calm for so long.
The epicenter of the quake, in the ocean about 150 miles up the
coast from Acapulco, lay within a kind of geological DMZ known
as a seismic gap: a region that had not experienced a major
earthquake for many years, but where bottled-up stress caused
by tectonic-plate activity had reached the bursting point.

Solid though it appears, the earth's crust is composed of a
dozen large plates and several smaller ones, ranging in
thickness from 20 to 150 miles. The plates are in constant
motion, riding on the molten mantle below and normally traveling
at the pace of a millimeter a week, equivalent to the growth
rate of a fingernail. Geophysicists Bill Spence of the U.S.
Geological Survey in Colorado says, "They're just like a mobile
jigsaw puzzle."  The plates' travels result in continental
drift, the formation of mountains, volcanoes--and earthquakes.

If plates carrying two continental masses collide, for example,
the crust buckles, creating craggy mountain ranges like the
Himalayas. If they grind past each other, as the Pacific and
North American plates do under California's San Andreas fault,
friction locks them together. Every so often, abrupt slippages
occur and the earth around them shudders in what geologists call
strike-slip quakes. Still another kind of tectonic phenomenon,
the meeting of an oceanic and a continental plate, is
responsible for the Mexican disaster.

With irresistible force, the Cocos plate, which forms part of
the Pacific floor off Mexico, is pushing northeastward at a rate
of 2 to 4 1/2 in. a year against the North American plate, which
is creeping westward. As the Cocos plate dips under the
continental crust, the oceanic mass sticks in certain places,
its motion halted by friction. But the force propelling Cocos
forward remains unrelenting, building up strain in the rock of
both plates. When the frictional forces are overcome, the
"stuck" section of the Cocos plate lurches forward (at least 10
ft. last week), generating the shock waves of a "thrust" quake.

In a kind of seismic party line, one earthquake may signal that
another could occur; sites that lie between past gaps hit by
recent tremors are the areas most likely to rupture next, rather
the way buttons popping on a shirt put greater pressure on the
buttons still intact. Noting that earthquakes in the 20th
century have periodically shaken surrounding regions, geologists
knew that Mexico's Michoacan gap--quiescent for many
decades--could not hold out forever. "Wherever stress builds
up for a long time in a seismic gap," says David Simpson of
Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory,
"something's got to give."

Ironically, coastal towns such as Zihuatanejo and Ixtapa, only
50 miles from the epicenter, suffered less damage than Mexico
City, 200 miles away. That is because the shoreline is made of
solid rock and thus shakes less violently. Mexico's capital,
however, was built on an alluvial lake bed. As a result, the
seismic waves, though diminished in intensity on their trip from
the coast, were amplified in the city's sediment foundation.
Many tall buildings in the densely populated metropolis may not
have been built to rigid quake- resistant standards. Indeed,
some turned out to be just the right height to vibrate or
resonate sympathetically with the frequency of the seismic
waves, thus shaking with greater vigor than other buildings.

If geologists are correct, more major earthquakes are in
store--and soon--for the Pacific coastal areas of Mexico and
neighboring Guatemala. McNally believes the region could be hit
by as many as five earthquakes in the 8.0 Richter range during
the next five years. Precisely when the temblors will occur is
another matter. Geologists are still restricted to long-term
predictions, parceled out by the year or decade rather than the
month or day. But by closely monitoring quake zones, they hope
to find subtle clues that will lead to more precise and reliable
forecasts. Keiiti Aki, a geophysicists at the University of
Southern California, has designed a detailed computer model that
combines such varied earthquake signposts as seismic anomalies,
strange animal behavior, changes in the water table and peculiar
bulges along the terrain.

Last week's disaster may lead to more insights. Scientists had
earlier set up sophisticated seismological instruments in and
around the Michoacan gap, and the devices were working when the
spasm occurred. Says Seismologist James Brune of the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography:  "It will be the best-recorded
major quake ever."

--By Natalie Angier.  Reported by Carol A. Johmann/New York and
Charles Pelton/San   Francisco