Our three-volume, first edition book is now available online through your Britannica Premium membership.\r\nIn the meantime, relief efforts were led by local residents, who began excavating neighbours and colleagues from fallen buildings and organizing the distribution of needed supplies themselves. This is the address to send it to. It made it extremely difficult to read these stories or they would turn the story around. We hurried through the calling because we knew the phone system in Mexico City was progressively failing as the central exchanges were literally falling down. On this day in 1985, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake rocked Mexico City and its surrounding environs at 9:17 a.m. EDT (7:17 a.m. local time). A lot of people were saved that night by the digging, survivors being dug out minute by minute. They had spent a lot of time together as children.COWAL: I think the most controversial thing that he [Ambassador Gavin] did, at least in my time there, happened just before I arrived.
Mexico certainly did not plan for earthquakes….There was one very frightening sight at Plaza de Tlateloco in Mexico City, where a large high-rise apartment building, probably a 15-story building, had just collapsed into a pile of bricks. Earthquake shakes Mexico City On September 19, 1985, a powerful earthquake strikes Mexico City and leaves 10,000 people dead, 30,000 injured and … One of the things that was most important were inflatable bladders for water. Journalists and other eyewitnesses, however, speculated that several times that number had perished. It was something she very much wanted to do. His mother was born in Mexico, in Sonora. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake struck in the early morning of 19 September at 07:17:50 with a moment magnitude of 8.0 and a maximal Mercalli intensity of IX . Elliot Abrams went from the State Department, I went from the NSC, Jim Rosebush was then Nancy Reagan’s Chief of Staff and Elaine Crispin was the First Lady’s press secretary. The digging went on amid continuing screams from within the fallen buildings. As you know, Mexico City airport is very close to the downtown, and thus very close to much of the damage. I really caught hell for that from the staff later because the Department neglected to tell anyone or inform our families.
I remember landing on the only runway left open at Benito Juarez International Airport to widespread chaos on the streets of the capital. He sometimes felt that you had to talk tough to Mexicans…. So there was probably 100,000 tourists.
I got on the phone about 10:00 a.m., when we found out everyone was okay, and tried to call Washington and tell the State Department that the American and Mexican Embassy personnel were unharmed.
The control tower operation was down so the airport was closed. In fact, some of the neighborhoods close to it were badly damaged.So a lot of what we did in USIS, we would also sponsor seminars for journalists and so on. I took advantage to ask the chauffeur to go through various neighborhoods where we heard there was great damage.I then assured the American staff, all of whom had come to work, that their families were being informed and we shouldn’t be tying up the few Embassy lines that might still be operative. Then suddenly, the volunteers raised their hands in the air, once again calling for silence. I knew that many Embassy people took in Mexicans and donated things and sympathized. It took me back to that awful day -- exactly 32 years ago -- when I landed in Mexico’s massive capital to cover the country’s last major earthquake on Sept. 19, 1985.It struck at 7:17 a.m. while most of the city’s residents were still at home: a violent trembling of the earth that registered a magnitude 8.0.