Mexico City Scars Remain From 1985’s Devastating Earthquake : Disaster: At least 6,000 people died and thousands of buildings were damaged in the temblor. The memory of sudden death still haunts the nearly 20 million people who live in this volcano-ringed basin.

At 7:19 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1985, the ancient lake bed beneath one of the world’s great cities began to quiver like a bowl of jelly--rocking to the rhythm of an earthquake 250 miles away on the Pacific Coast.

Maria de la Luz Calderon rode the seismic waves that rolled through her apartment building. She watched the walls crack, the ceiling break and, like uncounted others, she fled to the streets.

A decade later, she remains there more or less, living in a camp of tin shelters with other quake victims, staying with six children in a 13-by-13-foot metal room divided into two rooms with a piece of cloth, sharing kitchens and bathrooms with about 30 other families.

The quake--by the most conservative estimates--killed at least 6,000 people and destroyed thousands of buildings, including major sections of three large hospitals, and it still scars Mexico City’s landscape.

The memory of sudden death still haunts the lives of the nearly 20 million people who live in this volcano-ringed basin. “The earthquake has not ended,” said German Dehesa, a playwright and a columnist for the Mexico City daily Reforma.

Sept. 14 brought a chilling reminder that Mexicans are living dangerously. Tens of thousands of Mexico City residents, many still in their pajamas and some weeping with fear, fled into the streets when the ground began to roll at 8:04 a.m.--nearly the same hour as the great quake of 1985.

Emergency sirens shrieked again across the capital and traffic suddenly halted on major highways as drivers stopped to jump from their swaying cars.

“The people here are almost psychotic” about quakes, said Alma Rosa Lopez, 31. Hundreds of people died just a few yards from her home in the 1985 quake.

This month’s 7.3-magnitude temblor was the biggest in Mexico since the 1985 disaster. Mexico City skyscrapers swayed, power lines danced and jiggled, and hundreds of simple adobe homes collapsed in the southern Mexican countryside, killing five people.

Calderon and a few hundred more still await the housing that nearly 40,000 other earthquake victims have already found.

“They told us it would be for a little time, one year, two years,” she said as her children watched television while finishing a meal of stuffed chiles. “For how many years, now?”

City officials, she said, “promised us many things, none of which they have complied with.”

The residents of the camp behind the chained gates of a hurricane fence on Pena y Pena Street have been offered apartments in the distant south of the city.

But they say bankers are demanding a down payment of about $875 and a salary at least triple the $2.80 minimum daily wage that many of them earn.

Another victim, Teresa Mogollan, 63, says the bank told her she is a year too old to qualify for financing. “It is not my fault that in 10 years they didn’t find me a house,” she said.

The working-class neighborhood around Pena y Pena is a collection of cheap new apartments, built to replace those that collapsed or were damaged.

Not far to the west, in the government-built Tlatelolco apartment complex where about 60,000 people live, Dr. Cuauhtemoc Abarca says he is still waiting for the government to finish making the rebuilt apartments there safe. He says at least seven of the large structures still remain dangerously tilted.

Like other victims, Abarca recalls the day of the quake with chilling clarity.

He and a friend were warming up for a run early that autumn morning when the earth began to shake with a dull deep sound “like a kind of turbine” and then the noise of breaking glass. He says he thought at first that somebody was throwing plates from a window.

When he turned to look at the 15-story Nuevo Leon building, the size of an ocean liner, 20 feet away, “I began to see an image as if the Nuevo Leon was a paper model, that a gigantic, invisible hand was crushing it.”

A cloud of dust enveloped him. “When I could see, I thought my eyes were fooling me, that it wasn’t true. And I ran to touch, to see if I could really touch what I was seeing. . . .

“But when we were touching the fallen walls of the Nuevo Leon, we began to hear the cries of the survivors.”

A little park with a concrete sundial now stands where the building once stood and perhaps 1,000 died.

Many new little parks and parking lots dot Mexico City now. Some buildings today show new steel bracing; some are still being rebuilt. Others, which had seemingly survived untouched, may hold future peril.

Roberto Meli, director of the federal Center for Disaster Protection, which was founded after the quake, says that some quake-damaged buildings were poorly reinforced. He added ominously:

“The next temblor will be in charge of identifying where things were badly done.”

Most of the weakened buildings are privately owned. Thousands of public buildings, schools and hospitals were reinforced, but some public buildings remain questionable. For example, engineers say the tower of the national railway company was never upgraded to standards. City officials say perhaps 2,000 decrepit buildings throughout the city remain risky.

For scientists as well as engineers, the great quake served as a backyard proving ground.

“The city is a laboratory for the movement of soils,” said Carlos Valdez, director of the Institute of Geophysics at the National Autonomous University here.

Though no major fault lines run through this mountain valley metropolis, he says, Mexico City is peculiarly vulnerable to quakes hundreds of miles away. Valdez explains that along Mexico’s Pacific coastline the Cocos plate is steadily working its way beneath the North American plate of the Earth’s crust.

Much of the city is built atop the muddy beds of drained lakes. Coastal quakes can send out waves, like deadly seismic music in the mud, that create long, rolling temblors. The Disaster Center’s Meli compares them to “a waltz,” in contrast to the sharp shocks of the shallow, slip-fault quakes in California.

Valdez says the waves that reach Mexico City through the soggy clays 100- to 200-feet deep resonate naturally, like struck crystal, at a frequency of about two seconds.

There’s the rub. Buildings of about 10 stories also resonate at that frequency.

Most of the gravest disasters in 1985 occurred in just such midsized buildings. Taller buildings, often better built, swayed horrifyingly but stayed erect.

The lesson led officials to impose stricter building codes in the vulnerable areas--a fact that Meli noted has changed the face of the city, pushing much new development to the safer west and south.

If the 1985 quake were repeated, Meli said, “We would surely see damage . . . but the damage would be much less, several times less, than in 1985.”

Seismologists have recorded more than 26,000 quakes of varying sizes over the last 20 years in Mexico. Quakes larger than the 7.1 temblor that rocked San Francisco in 1989 are not uncommon; historical records show 44 estimated at 7.5 or greater.

But scientists estimate that in the last seven centuries Mexico City has been shaken by only eight quakes of magnitude 8 or greater. Valdez believes a quake of that size so soon after 1985 is unlikely.

Seismologists like Valdez are especially worried by a 60-mile-long zone along the coast between Acapulco and Zihuatanejo that seems overdue. It generated four quakes of magnitude 7 or more around the turn of the century, but none since 1911. Valdez says that may indicate a building up of subterranean pressures.

For many here, like playwright Dehesa, the great quake shook their faith in government as much as it did the city.

“The system has not recovered,” Dehesa said. “Really, the most damaged structure was that called the PRI,” the Institutional Revolutionary Party which has governed since 1929.

After the quake, perhaps a million or more survivors joined the hunt for bodies, many risking their lives in the treacherous ruins, others bringing food and water to the searchers.

But the government, Dehesa recalls, seemed feckless, indifferent, insisting that the city was returning to normal even as tens of thousands hunted for signs of life in the ruins.

The ruins exposed tales of horror: Corrupt construction and inspection of official buildings; tortured prisoners in the rubble of a city prison; garment workers crushed in overcrowded sweatshops.

Dr. Abarca and others say they saw at least a few soldiers or policemen looting homes.

Almost the first response of security officials was to cordon off the destruction zones--creating confrontations with desperate, would-be rescuers.

“I was indignant,” recalls Francisco Alvarado, “because the government, instead of helping the population, sent the police and army to set up cordons.” Alvarado is a member of the Mexico City Assembly for the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party.

“They were making calls on the radio for us not to leave our houses. . . . Like thousands of other people, I ignored the government’s instructions because we knew there were thousands of people suffering . . . and we had to do something to rescue those people.”

Abarca recalls: “We didn’t have any equipment. We didn’t even have sticks, picks, gloves, nothing.” Yet, he says, volunteers at the Nuevo Leon building pulled at least 150 survivors from the ruins the first day. It was three days before giant government cranes arrived from the Gulf Coast to lift the fallen concrete slabs.

Analysts say anger over the government’s performance after the quake of ’85 might have had a political aftershock in the election of ’88. In the presidential balloting that year, the government’s computers mysteriously failed with an opposition candidate leading.

The resilient PRI won the 1994 presidential election, but it appears now more vulnerable than ever. In 10 state elections this year, held during an economic crisis, it has been outpolled in total by an opposition party.

“The great error . . . was not to speak to people with the truth, or to try to hide what cannot be hidden,” said Carlos Sainz, director of the city Civil Protection Department, created only after the quake.

Sainz says the truth is that Mexico City is in a seismic zone where earthquakes are probably inevitable and possibly “devastating.” But he says that because of lessons learned from the ’85 quake, “We have a better capacity to respond than before.”

City officials meet weekly to plan for emergencies. Telephone exchanges have been decentralized to avoid the collapse of communications that occurred in 1985. A controversial quake warning system is being developed; it gave Mexico City about 50 seconds’ notice before the Sept. 14 shaking began. (Seismic detectors flashed an alarm to 40 radio stations, which automatically interrupted every program and broadcast an immediate warning.)

Many today say the ’85 quake was a turning point in their lives. Alvarado’s involvement led him into political action. Abarca abandoned a career as a government medical administrator to work in neighborhood organizations.

“We are never going to forget,” said Abarca, speaking for millions of Mexicans. “We could say that we were one thing before that moment and another after that moment.”