The thing about the Pacific coast is that people often forget about the earthquakes that take place outside of California. For both the Asian side of the Pacific rim (New Zealand, Japan) and the American side (San Francisco, Hawaii), the risk of earthquakes is very real and very dangerous. Take, for example, the recent 7.4 earthquake in Mexico. While no one was killed, 11 people were hurt and hundreds of homes were damaged or destroyed by the massive Mexican earthquake. The quake was centered about 15 miles outside of Ometepec in the state of Guerrero in the southwestern portion of the country.
“There are many cracked ceilings, many houses that collapsed,” says Francisca Villalva Davila, the comptroller of the city of Ometepec, near the earthquake’s epicenter in Guerrero, Mexico.
The nearby state of Oaxaca suffered most of the injuries, with 9 people being hurt by the trembling. The earthquake was felt as far away as Mexico City, some 200 miles from the quake’s origin point. No doubt the earthquake brought back fears of the Mexico City quake in 1985, which resulted in some 10,000 fatalities due to the region’s volcanic ash soil and substandard building codes.
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