"A Noise Like Thunder"

By Ed Magnuson.

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 early 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 was 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 of 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 7.0 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 heart 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 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 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 tilted 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 worshiped 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 box), 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."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty, David S. Jackson and Harry Kelly/Mexico City and Ricardo Chavira/Acapulco