‘I was afraid the walls were going to fall down’: Utah man visiting family in Mexico describes living through deadly earthquake

A Utah man who was visiting his family in Mexico this week was just getting into bed Thursday night when the walls around him began to shake.

Fermin Mendoza Delgado and his parents, who are in their 90s, were staying the night at his sister’s home in San Cristobal de las Casas in the Mexican state of Chiapas. When the tremors began, he tried to get up from the bed, but the shaking became stronger and stronger for about two minutes, he said, and prevented him from leaving the room.

“I was afraid the walls were going to fall down,” Mendoza Delgado told The Tribune in Spanish on Saturday.

The 8.0-magnitude earthquake’s epicenter was more than 150 miles from where the family was staying, about 102 miles west of the costal city of Tapachula in the same state.

Through the windows, Mendoza Delgado said he saw street lights swaying, and once the trembling calmed down, he heard the cries of people coming out of their houses.

“They were praying and crying,” he said in Spanish. ”It made a very, very strong impression on me, being there in this moment.”

He and his family stayed awake until 3 or 4 in the morning, he said, listening and watching as the aftershocks grew calmer.

Other siblings, who live closer to the coast, sought refuge in an LDS meetinghouse. The earthquake was followed by a hurricane. His family was lucky, said Mendoza Delgado, that their homes weren’t made of adobe, which crumbled under the pressure.

While the experience was frightening, Mendoza Delgado said he felt grateful to have been there with his family, to ”go through the danger together.”

Mexico’s president says the death toll in the powerful earthquake that struck off the country’s southern coast has risen to 61. The toll includes 45 in Oaxaca state, 12 in Chiapas and four in Tabasco.

Though the city where Mendoza Delgado was staying suffered minimal damage by comparison, the stress from the earthquake made some people panic, he said. After the quake subsided, a boy had gone to his father’s room and found the man dead of a heart attack, Mendoza Delgado said. The Red Cross was taking people to the hospital for shock.

A wave of people had also fled inland in search of family members and refuge, Mendoza Delgado said.

Several old Catholic churches were closed to the public, he said, as officials inspected damage. Part of a wall in a museum had fallen apart.

The roads were drivable, and at the airport he flew out of Saturday, there were broken windows, but nothing that prevented flying.

Mendoza Delgado’s wife and daughter, who were at home in Lehi, were asleep when the earthquake hit, he said, so he didn’t call them until Friday morning. At first, they didn’t understand the gravity of the situation, but as they researched the extent of the quake online, he said they worried about him. His daughter cried, he said.

When he got off the plane Saturday afternoon in Las Vegas, Mendoza Delgado said he “ran to hug them.”

“They‘d been afraid they weren’t going to see me again,” he said. ”It was beautiful to see them there waiting for me.”