By IANS
Mexico City : More than two million residents of the Mexican capital participated in an evacuation drill on the 22nd anniversary of the magnitude-8.1 earthquake that killed thousands here, Spanish news agency EFE said.
Thousands of buildings were evacuated in an alert simulation for a magnitude-6.9 tremor that lasted 34 seconds and the epicentre of which was hypothetically located on the Pacific coast of the southern state of Guerrero.
The head of the municipal civil defence office, Elias Moreno, said that public participation was “massive and synchronized” and that during the drill some two million were evacuated from more than 5000 buildings all over the city.
Some 70,000 students and professors were evacuated from buildings of the National Autonomous University of Mexico within five minutes, authorities said.
A civil defence official told EFE that a small building can be evacuated in about 45 seconds, but a big one, like the 45-storey Torre Latino, takes 14 minutes to be emptied of people.
Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who Wednesday participated in the inauguration of an international forum of Earthquake Megacities Initiative, spoke of the experience gained in 1985.
On Sep 19 of that year, a powerful quake struck the capital, killing some 10,000 people, according to government figures. Unofficial sources say more than 45,000 were killed in the natural disaster.
The quake also caused economic losses worth more than 40 billion pesos ($3.7 billion).
Ebrard said the government’s civil protection strategy is to expand the staging of similar unannounced drills at public sites, like offices, schools and even the subway system.
Also, authorities will reinforce the city’s 3,000 “at-risk” houses “to reduce the social impact” in the case of a real quake.