Residents of the capital on a street in the historic center after hearing the seismic alarm this Monday Moisés Pablo Nava (Cuartoscuro)
The noisy Mexico City seismic alert was activated this Monday in various parts of the capital, although no tremors were recorded. The head of government of Mexico City has attributed what happened to “a human error”. “We apologize to everyone, it was part of the review process that alerts are normally made,” he lamented at a news conference after the event flooded social media with comments about the event.
“It wasn’t a planned verification process, but they maintained the server,” added the leader, who believes there needs to be a review of the officials and companies that conducted the review. Only in a few places in the capital was the alarm sounded, over 851 of the 13,772 loudspeakers spread across the city. Mexico City’s Command, Control, Computing, Communications and Citizen Contact Center (C5) has said it is continuing work to find out the specific causes that triggered the alert.
The SkyAlert platform – which is dedicated to warning about earthquakes and natural hazards – said minutes before the authorities’ statements came out that they had no earthquake records in any part of the country. Mexico is one of the countries in the world with the highest seismic activity, with more than 90 earthquakes of more than 4 degrees on the Richter scale per year, 60% of all tellurium movements recorded worldwide, according to the Secretariat of the capital’s Comprehensive Risk Management and Civil Protection.
Mexico City has experienced three catastrophic earthquakes in the last few decades. On March 14, 1979, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the capital, causing the collapse of three Universidad Iberoamericana buildings and affecting around 600 buildings. On September 19, 1985, a temperature of 8.1 degrees caused between 3,000 and 20,000 deaths according to different estimates and the devastation of the century in the country. On September 19, 2017, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake returned to the city, leaving 369 dead.
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