MEXICO CITY — A magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Mexico’s central Pacific coast on Monday, killing at least one person and setting off a seismic alarm in the rattled capital on the anniversary of two earlier devastating quakes.
There were at least some early reports of damage to buildings from the quake, which hit at 1:05 p.m. local time, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey.
It said the quake was centered 23 miles southeast of Aquila near the boundary of Colima and Michoacan states at a depth of 9.4 miles.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said via Twitter that the secretary of the navy had told him that one person was killed in the port city of Manzanillo, Colima, when a wall at a mall collapsed.
In Coalcomán, Michoacan, near the quake’s epicenter, buildings were damaged, including a hospital, according to local residents, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.
Mexico City’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, tweeted that there were no reports of damage in the capital, but power was out in parts of the city, including stoplights, snarling the capital’s traffic.
Alarms for the new quake came less than an hour after quake alarms warbled in a nationwide earthquake simulation marking major, deadly quakes that struck on the same date in 1985 and 2017.
“This is a coincidence,” that this is the third Sept. 19 earthquake, said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Paul Earle. “There’s no physical reason or statistical bias toward earthquakes in any given month in Mexico.”
Humberto Garza stood outside a restaurant in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood holding his 3-year-old son. Like many milling about outside after the earthquake, Mr. Garza said that the real earthquake alarm sounded so soon after the annual simulation that he was not sure it was genuine.
“I heard the alarm, but it sounded really far away,” he said.
