One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico and a raging hurricane have dealt a devastating one-two punch to the country, killing at least 61 people.
The 8.1 quake off the southern Pacific coast just before midnight Thursday toppled hundreds of buildings in several states.
Hardest-hit was Juchitan, Oaxaca, where 36 people died and a third of the city's homes collapsed or were otherwise rendered uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network.
In downtown Juchitan, the remains of brick walls and clay tile roofs cluttered streets as families dragged mattresses onto sidewalks to spend a second anxious night sleeping outdoors. Some were newly homeless, while others feared further aftershocks could topple their cracked adobe dwellings.
"We are all collapsed, our homes and our people," said Rosa Elba Ortiz Santiago, 43, who sat with her teenage son and more than a dozen neighbours on an assortment of chairs. "We are used to earthquakes, but not of this magnitude."
Even as she spoke, across the country, Hurricane Katia was roaring onshore north of Tecolutla in Veracruz state, pelting the region with intense rains and winds.
The US National Hurricane Center reported Katia's maximum sustained winds had dropped to 120 km/h, making it a Category 1 storm.
It was still expected to bring life-threatening floods and storm surge off the Gulf of Mexico, though the extent of the storm's impact was unclear in the dark of night.
Pena Nieto announced that the earthquake killed 45 people in Oaxaca state, 12 in Chiapas and 4 in Tabasco, and he declared three days of national mourning. The toll included 36 dead in Juchitan, located on the narrow waist of Oaxaca known as the Isthmus, where a hospital and about half the city hall also collapsed into rubble.
The city's civil defence coordinator, Jose Antonio Marin Lopez, said similar searches had been going on all over the area since the previous night.
Teams found bodies in the rubble, but the highlight was pulling four people, including two children, alive from the completely collapsed Hotel Del Rio where one woman died.
"The priority continues to be the people," Marin said.
