On the anniversary of the 40 years of the tragic earthquake of 1985 and eight of the occurred in 2017, Mexico made a national macrosimulation on Friday that remembers the two most destructive earthquakes in the recent history of the country, amid the fear of a new telluric movement and where thousands of Mexicans received a seismic alert to their cell phones.
At 12:00 local time he reached the message that was destined for the more than 80 million users, which caused the vibration and emergency sound of mobile phones in national territory.
“This is a drill – this is a message to prove the functionality of the National Government alerts System as part of the second 2025 national drill,” said the text received, which had as a hypothesis an earthquake with magnitude of 8.1 with epicenter in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán.
In addition to the notice, the seismic alert was activated in the Mexican capital through 99% of the 13,992 speakers that the city has, according to the head of government, Clara Brugada, who said that in this “great simulation” 8.1 million people participated, the maximum recorded to date, with an average evacuation time of 65 seconds.
In Paseo de la Reforma, one of the financial areas that brings together the highest buildings in Mexico, the public and private sector brigades teams – which represented a figure greater than 75,000 people – arrived before the simulation.
Although, Jaqueline, a member of ‘Rotary Brigade’, told Efe that there was “little participation.”
“It is the first year where we do not see so much movement, the other years we have seen that progress is progress. Everything is quite delayed, the truth,” he warned.
Among hundreds of people who were being evicted from the buildings, it was that the alert was heard in hundreds of cell phones, as a positive symbol of its operation, although Nicole, a brigadist of the HSBC bank, is not so sure of its effectiveness.
“I do not know if in real emergency cases it is so effective (…) what truly helps is the social consciousness that has been generated with the previous earthquakes,” he said after remembering the 2017 earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.1 degrees on the Richter scale and that of 1985.
Giovanna, worker and former Brigadista of the offices of the Torre Mayor, said that people like their mother – who suffered the ravages of the 1985 earthquake, the most tragic of the last two centuries with a force of 8.1 degrees – are not prepared to receive such a alert in their cell phone.
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“People get much more scared, the simple cellular noise stresses them very much (…) I prefer that my mother or see the message, because she does not forget the trauma of 85,” he said.
The earthquakes of 1985 and 2017 have been the most devastating and, in addition, they agreed on the same date, the first happened at 7:19 hours and the second 13:14 hours, so Mexicans remember them with nostalgia and fear that an earthquake will happen again.
Although, as Nicole recalls, among Mexicans, he beats that September 19, 85, when the authorities “failed”, but the “solidarity triumphed” against a disaster that left an official figure of 3,192 deaths, although specialists estimate that there were actually more than 20,000 for irregularities in the count.
With EFE information
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