There was another huge earthquake in Mexico on Thursday, and two people were killed when they ran out onto the streets of the city in the middle of the night.
Both victims in Mexico City were female; one died after falling down stairs and hitting her head during the quake’s early warning sirens, and the other died of a heart attack.
It was stated by the national seismological service that the epicenter of the 6.9-magnitude earthquake was located around 84 kilometers (52 miles) south of Coalcoman in the western state of Michoacan, on the Pacific coast.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) put the magnitude at 6.8.
According to the national seismological agency, it was the strongest of more than 1,200 aftershocks that followed a magnitude 7.7 quake that hit the same location on Monday.
Over 400 kilometers away in Mexico City, people panicked after hearing reports of two deaths and many thousand damaged buildings caused by the earthquake in western Mexico.
Shortly after 1:00 am (0600 GMT), the newest tremor shook the capital city, setting off alarms and making buildings tremble and heave.
When the sirens went out, a lot of people rushed out of their houses, some of them still in their jammies and some of them with their pets in tow.
Coalcoman was the epicenter of a 6.9-magnitude aftershock, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador tweeted.
“Michoacan (and the other states of) Colima, Jalisco, Guerrero, and Mexico City felt the tremors. Damage reports have not been received as of yet “I’ll add that, he said.
According to Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, no immediate reports of damage have been received despite the fact that official helicopters have flown over the city.
She tweeted that, “so far, there appears to be no damage in the city” following the earthquake.
About 410 kilometers from Mexico City, the earthquake struck at a depth of 12 kilometers, according to the national seismological office, although the USGS put the depth at 24 kilometers.
On the heels of emergency drills held by millions of Mexicans on Monday to commemorate the anniversaries of two deadly earthquakes in 1985 and 2017, a new quake struck the capital city less than an hour later.
According to the national seismological agency, the timing was merely a coincidence.
It went on to say, “there is no scientific rationale to explain it.”
More than 10,000 people were killed and hundreds of buildings were damaged when an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.1 struck on September 19, 1985.
In 2017, on the one-year anniversary of that quake, a 7.1 quake struck, killing an estimated 370 people, mostly in the capital.
A guy in Manzanillo, in the western state of Colima, was killed by falling rubble at a shopping mall during Monday’s earthquake.
In the same city, a woman later died from her injuries sustained when a wall collapsed.
Location in the Ring of Fire, where the Pacific plate meets the other tectonic plates, makes Mexico one of the most seismically and volcanically active places on Earth.
Built on a natural basin filled with the sediment of a former lake, Mexico City and its neighboring metropolitan areas are home to more than 20 million people, making them extremely sensitive to earthquakes.
An early warning alarm system in the nation’s capital uses seismic monitors to alert people of impending earthquakes in the Pacific Rim, giving them more time to leave their homes.