Stories behind the 2017 earthquakes in Mexico: response-recovery-reconstruction

This publication contains 13 testimonies of those who were in Mexico in the front lines responding to the disaster from the health, education, culture, first response, international cooperation and reconstruction sectors. Around midnight on September 7, 2017, an earthquake measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale shook the States of Oaxaca and Chiapas in southern Mexico, causing gigantic human and material losses. The damage from that earthquake had not been counted yet, when on September 19 around 13.00 hours, a new earthquake hit central Mexico specifically the cities of Morelos, Puebla and Mexico City, in that moment  it was 7.1 degrees of Richter, which generated large losses that exacerbated the damage already caused by the September 7th earthquake.

The earthquakes left 480 casualties, as well as damage to around 150,000 homes, 12,000 schools and 1,500 historical monuments. According to World Bank estimates, reconstruction costs are expected to reach $ 2 billion. The PRERADE project (“Preparation for a better Response, Recovery and Reconstruction - Learning from the Ethnography of Disasters”) provides a lense through which testimonies of the protagonists during the earthquakes have been compiled and which can be disseminated as lessons learned for future disaster scenariosThese testimonies are an important reference for Mexicans and for all those who live in earthquake-prone regions in the world.