A Noise Like Thunder

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While the fashionable boutiques and crafts shops along the nearby Avenida Juarez were not to open for several hours, interns had started making their rounds in a complex of hospitals within the National Medical Center. It was a bit early for much activity in the wealthy northwestern and southern neighborhoods, where hacienda-style houses sit next to modernistic concrete- and-glass homes. But life begins early each day in the overcrowded shantytowns at the edge of the sprawling city, where unemployment stands at 12% and underemployment is estimated at 40%.

At the Continental Hotel, on the Reforma, Eva Hernandez, a Costa Rican tourist, was staying in Room 930. "It started to shake," she said. "We ran out of the room. We ran down the stairs and we ran and ran. The building was falling all around us. Rocks were falling on us. My roommate fell and her pajamas were torn off, but we kept on running. Now there is nothing there, where we were. Nothing." The hotel's top two floors had collapsed, spewing debris onto the boulevard below.

Maricela Alcaraz, 22, was at breakfast with her mother and two younger brothers in their apartment on the south side of the city. The lamp above the kitchen table began swinging back and forth, casting strange shadows on undulating walls. "Oh my God!" Maricela shouted. Her mother jumped up, ordered the children to go into a bedroom and stay together. They could hear doors banging as the building trembled. "The whole world was shaking," Maricela recalled.

Bertoldo Garcia Cruz, a car mechanic, had just taken his son to Public School No. 3 on Avenida Chapultepec. "We were in the school's main office when everything around us, four floors, went down. I helped take out four bodies, mutilated, all 14-year-olds. I took one out who was injured, but maybe he'll live."

Jose Saltiel, 56, was shaving in his two-story house in Las Lomas when "the ground started shaking and the bathroom appeared to be swirling." He grabbed his son and stood in a doorway. He later went to his office, but, he said, "I was scared. I thought a bomb had been dropped."

TIME Reporter Andrea Dabrowski was pouring coffee in the kitchen of her apartment in the center of the capital. "I thought I was sick," she said. "There was this terrible dizzy feeling. Some way, I stumbled to the doorway. The buildings across the street were swaying, really swaying. It was like being rocked in a boat. There were all these sounds of cracking and crackling, and the electric lines popping. I yelled out, 'God save me!' " The quake knocked many of the city's radio and television stations off the air. One exception was Channel 13, which provided the world with the first images of the disaster. A young man who did not give his name tearfully told a Channel 13 interviewer that he heard "a tremendous noise, and I grabbed my daughter and jumped out the window of my apartment. Everything was being twisted. I was trapped in the ruins with my daughter, but we were rescued. I had no chance to help my wife, who was killed when she was buried by the rubble."