Death toll 61 in Mexico quake as hurricane hits Gulf coast

Families were jerked awake by the grating howl of the capital's seismic alarm. Some shouted as they dashed out of rocking apartment buildings. Even the iconic Angel of Independence Monument swayed as the quake's waves rolled through the city's soft soil.

Part of a bridge on a highway being built to the site of Mexico City's planned new international airport collapsed due to the earthquake, local media reported.

Elsewhere, the extent of destruction was still emerging. Hundreds of buildings collapsed or were damaged, power was cut at least briefly to more than 1.8 million people and authorities closed schools Friday in at least 11 states to check them for safety.

The Interior Department reported that 428 homes were destroyed and 1,700 were damaged in various cities and towns in Chiapas.

"Homes made of clay tiles and wood collapsed," said Nataniel Hernandez, a human rights worker living in Tonala, Chiapas, who warned that inclement weather threatened to bring more down.

"Right now it is raining very hard in Tonala, and with the rains it gets much more complicated because the homes were left very weak, with cracks," Hernandez said by phone.

The earthquake's impact was blunted somewhat by the fact that it was centered 100 miles offshore. It hit off Chiapas' Pacific coast, near the Guatemalan border, with a magnitude of 8.1 - equal to Mexico's strongest quake of the past century. It was slightly stronger than the 1985 quake, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The epicenter was in a seismic hotspot in the Pacific where one tectonic plate dives under another. These subduction zones are responsible for producing some of the biggest quakes in history, including the 2011 Fukushima disaster and the 2004 Sumatra quake that spawned a deadly tsunami.

The quake struck at 11:49 p.m. Thursday (12:49 a.m. EDT; 4:49 a.m. GMT Friday). Its epicenter was 102 miles (165 kilometers) west of Tapachula in Chiapas, with a depth of 43.3 miles (69.7 kilometers), the USGS said.

Dozens of strong aftershocks rattled the region in the following hours.

Three people were killed in San Cristobal, including two women who died when a house and a wall collapsed, Chiapas Gov. Manuel Velasco said.

"There is damage to hospitals that have lost energy," he said. "Homes, schools and hospitals have been damaged."

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