Her phone buzzed.
Carla Vallin picked up and saw three recurring words amid a pile of texts.
Earthquake.
Mexico City.
Vallin lives and works in West Vancouver. Her children go to École Cedardale. But seven years earlier her life was in Mexico City. It where she was raised and where her she had her daughters.
She turned on the TV news and watched as the crisis unfolded in Mexico’s capital.
The densely populated city had been hit with a 7.1 magnitude quake. Two earthquakes would follow within the week, killing more than 300 people, levelling dozens of buildings and damaging thousands of homes.
As rescuers pulled bodies from rubble and tent cities popped up to shelter the newly homeless, Vallin tried to reach out to her friends and relatives.
With phone lines jammed, she eventually got word through the messaging app WhatsApp that the people she loved were safe.
However, in the neighbourhood where she grew up, two buildings collapsed, affecting 150 families and leaving two high school friends in desperate straits.
“Now they have no home, no nothing,” she says.
Vallin and her children wanted to help the Mexican people any way they could.
Over the weekend Vallin and her children were part of a donation drive at École Cedardale. With some help from their neighbours, they collected painkillers, first-aid kits, sanitary pads, diapers, bedding, towels and clothing.
Vallin has been working with Spanish-language station Net Radio Online and Aeromexico to deliver two aid packages and she’s hoping to hand-deliver one more bundle by late Friday.
“People are always grateful about getting something when they have nothing.”
Vallin is taking donations for the Lindavista neighbourhood. It’s where she grew up and where she experienced another tragic earthquake.
. . .
The 7.1 magnitude earthquake that shook Mexico City on Sept. 19 came exactly 32 years after a devastating quake that killed more than 9,500 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
More than 400 buildings collapsed and approximately 100,000 people were left homeless following the 1985 catastrophe.
Vallin lived through that earthquake as a teenager. The experience that demonstrated the fragility of life.
“We have nothing for sure,” she says.
The earthquake covered 825,000 square kilometres and was likely felt by 20 million people, according to the USGS.
The quake triggered a tsunami, rock slides, and opened cracks in the ground, despite the fact that its epicenter was estimated to be several hundred miles west of Mexico City, according to an article on LiveScience.com.
Beneath Mexico City there are large quantities of silt and clay with a high water content. That mixture can make a bad quake even worse. The area is also prone to quakes as the Cocos tectonic plate forces its way beneath the edge of the North American plate, according to an article from the California Institute of Technology tectonics observatory.
The two plates grind against each other, dragging lower until the stress is overwhelming. That’s when one plate shoots up, lifting the ocean floor and causing a quake as well as, in some instances, a tsunami.
. . .
“We have the best of both countries, and we are so grateful here,” Vallin says of her life in West Vancouver. “It’s nice that we can have both cultures.”
Collecting money and supplies for Mexico is about helping people in their time of need, she explains.
“It could happen to anyone,” Vallin says of the earthquakes. “Even here.”
In 2015, a five-year study into the effects of an earthquake in the District of North Vancouver concluded waterfront buildings would tumble, landslides would be triggered near major rivers, and thousands of homes would be without power or water.
There’s a feeling of being isolated following a catastrophe. It’s why Vallin wants to reach out to generous people across the North Shore. “If we are at the point that we can give something, it will be appreciated, whatever you have.”
Vallin is accepting e-transfer donations through her Spanish-language academy Words in Motion, at [email protected]
Supplies can also be donated at 805 Prospect Ave. in North Van until Sunday.
