1985 Mexico City Earthquake - 27 September 1985

Turning off the telly the other night after watching brutal scenes of rubble and grief it struck me that perhaps the most embarrassing assignment a reporter could ask for and get would be the Mexican earthquake.

What is there to say about it? I consulted, via the tube, the absolutely top reporters of the big networks. Every one of them worth his salt and his prodigious salary was rushed down there because you can’t just have an anchorman sitting in New York seeing the pictures relayed by satellite and just talking about it, can you?

Well yes, I think you could, but I can’t imagine a network vice-president in charge of news who would dare to keep his top man home. So what did we see and hear? We saw the star standing in front of a collapsed hotel or hospital, then a shot of a weeping mother or wife, another shot of rescue workers tossing girders and planks or carrying stretchers and back to the star having to shout above his normal studio pitch and saying mainly isn’t it awful.

The only good that has come out of the nightly scenes of disaster and homelessness is the word which both the American government and the network reporters have stressed over and over – not to clutter the airlines and the rescue chains by sending food or blankets but to send money to the Red Cross or Care or some other institution whose daily business is hunger and calamity.

In the short run the most useful thing that an ordinary citizen – or even a news commentator – can do is to help by way of slipping a cheque inside an envelope. In the long run, which the business sections of the papers are beginning to ponder, there’s the truly daunting question of what happens to Mexico’s billions of dollars' worth of debts.

The country’s economy was already in crisis. Its government has twice this winter deflated the value of the peso and there was no prospect that in the foreseeable future it could begin to pay the interest on its debt. Today the long-term fear is that a collapsed Mexican economy could drag down Central and much of South America.

However, I don’t think it’s any help to anybody to go on about what might happen. A side-effect of the two earthquakes has been to bring up in a very contemporary form the question who is to blame, even now, for an act of God. Only five days after the disaster a bunch of Mexican intellectuals, mostly writers but also including some architects, is beginning to mutter and snarl at the government and charge that much of the damage was the responsibility of architects and developers who violated the building code.

The leader of this group, known as the Group of 100, went as far as accusing the government of corruption and inefficiency. An architect from the Mexican College of Architects said that judging from reports he’d had from two to three hundred of its members there was a very high possibility that many buildings were poorly built and with the wrong materials.

I should guess that that could be said of any big city, but what we have here is an extension of the current mania for citing professionals – doctors are the worst victims – for malpractice. We’ve got to the point, I think, in our bedazzlement with technology, with the miraculous calculations of computers, with heart transplants and by-passes and the like that we get mad when something goes wrong or we are not guaranteed a perfect cure or the delivery of a perfect baby.

In this country, in the two most populous states of California and New York obstetricians have to pay the highest malpractice premiums of any medical specialists, something between 60 and 70 thousand dollars a year. That goes out before they’ve earned a penny for themselves and the second penny for the internal revenue service.

The mania has spread to the most improbable litigants like the fishermen who recently sued the weather bureau for failing to predict a storm that capsized their boat. I guess that, if they’d all survived, their suit might have failed. As it was, some of them died and the survivors successfully carried their case.

Which reminds me, the weather bureau just now as I talk is giving us hourly warnings about the approach of a top-notch hurricane, Hurricane Gloria, with winds of over 150 miles an hour. There was a time, not many years ago, when the bureau would have taken the risk of pinpointing the spot on the map on the Atlantic coast where a hurricane was likely to strike but with their new and justifiable sensitivity to damage suits the weathermen have flatly warned everybody who lives along the mid-Atlantic coast from North Carolina up to Northern Maine – that’s about twelve hundred miles – to keep an eye or ear out for what is simply called a most dangerous hurricane.

This means anybody living anywhere along the coast of North Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Long Island and the seashores of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. In other words, don’t say we didn’t warn you and your lawyer too.

In all the statistical detail that ballasted much of the reporting of the damage in Mexico City there was one figure that caught my eye and made me think that whatever may be the ratio of doctors to city dwellers down there there must be a very great scarcity of lawyers for the poor.

This is the shocking figure. The population of Mexico City, the heart of the capital, is second only I believe in size to Shanghai. It’s over nine million, but with the industrial suburbs and the endless bedraggled petticoats of that enormous smog city there are about 18 million people and over 10,000 factories and an annual death rate attributed to diseases caused by industrial pollution of 100,000.

I pass this on from the usually very reliable source of a television network news bureau. It seems incredible when you compare it with the mere hundreds of workers in many American states who are involved in suits against various industries. One hundred thousand a year. If half of the surviving relatives sued I should think they would bankrupt several thousand of those smoking factories and that picture brings us to a bitter and still unresolved quarrel between the United States and its northern neighbour, Canada.

For several years now, and with increasing and understandable testiness, the Canadians have been protesting about the sulphur dioxide emitted by power plants in the American midwest amounting to something like 20 million tons or more that goes up into the atmosphere every year and then when the prevailing south-west wind blows and combines with rain-packed clouds descends farther east and north as acid rain.

Of course it comes down on the north-eastern states of the United States, and New Hampshire for one has done a deal of complaining, but the first victims in point of time are the Canadians. They want something done about it. They’ve been wanting for years.

President Carter commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to study the causes and possible cure of acid rain and it came up with the blunt conclusion that 20 million tons of emitted sulphur dioxide a year is about 10 million tons too much, if we were to go on protecting the soils, the crops, and hence the food supply and the health of people in the north-eastern United States.

This was not a doomsday report – not to get excited just yet – but that study, now about eight or nine years old did say that new technology was desperately needed to replace or modify our coal-burning systems. So what happened? There was, as you may know, a changing of the guard at the White House.

The Reagan administration came in and for a time it was clear, I believe, that it suffered from an ideological distaste for environmentalists. They were usually Democrats or worse who had been kicking up a fuss for years about polluted lakes and rivers and the strip-mining of lands that adjoin the national parks and so on, but the environmental protection agency was there and not going to be disbanded, and Mr Reagan appointed a new head who looked at the acid rain problem and said yes, the answer was to control the emission of sulphur dioxide.

Still the administration couldn’t really believe that anything so drastic was called for. Perhaps a new and more careful study should be undertaken? So there was another hefty research effort, same conclusion. Of course when you’re the President of the United States and a commission you’ve appointed tells you that the vast industrial heartland of the country had better mend its ways, it seems to be saying that you’re going to have to cut in half the present efficiency of thousands of factories pending some new technological breakthrough.

President Reagan couldn’t believe it. He was genuinely concerned, but sceptical. So he appointed a special man, a special envoy, so-called to work with the Canadians on the problems of acid rain. The president wanted to know if it really was a fact that the noxious but precious and profitable sulphur dioxide really did what all these commissions and experts had been saying it did. It does, said Mr Lewis, and he’s now suggested that about $1billion dollars had better be put up to stop it.

We on the northern Atlantic coast don’t worry much about acid rain, since most of it is dumped first on middle Canada, but we Long Islanders have recently had our own small but wounding experience of pollution. I must have said before now that one of the noblest inhabitants of the Atlantic water that laps the south shore and of the beautiful protein factory of Peconic Bay is the striped bass, an incomparable eating fish.

There have been no striped bass this year. By edict, they spawn in the Hudson River and the Hudson River has polluted their young. We were advised in the spring not to eat any striped bass in the waters at the west end of the island, that is close to the city and the Hudson.

Need I say that nobody’s going to look at a fish and ask him where he came from. So the commercial fishermen have thrown back any haul taken even at our eastern end. Better safe than sick.

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