A powerful earthquake has hit central Mexico, cracking building facades and scattering rubble in the capital on the anniversary of a devastating 1985 quake.
The quake caused buildings to sway sickeningly in Mexico City and sent panicked office workers streaming into the streets, but the full extent of the damage was not yet clear.
The US Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 7.1 and was centred near the Puebla state town of Raboso, about 76 miles south east of Mexico City.
Thousands of people fled office buildings and hugged to calm each other along Mexico City's central Reforma Avenue as alarms blared, and traffic stopped around the Angel of Independence monument.
In the Roma neighbourhood, which was struck hard by the 1985 quake, piles of stucco and brick fallen from building facades littered the streets.
Two men calmed a woman seated on a stool in the street, blood trickling form a small wound on her knee.
At a nearby market, a worker in a hardhat walked around the outside warning people not to smoke as a smell of gas filled the air.
Market trader Edith Lopez, 25, was in a taxi a few blocks away when the quake struck.
She said she saw glass bursting out of the windows of some buildings. She was anxiously trying to locate her children, whom she had left in the care of her disabled mother.
Pictures fell from office building walls, objects were shaken off of flat surfaces and computer monitors toppled over.
Some people dived for cover under desks and local media broadcast video of whitecap waves churning the city's normally placid canals of Xochimilco as boats bobbed up and down.
Earlier in the day workplaces across the city held preparation drills on the anniversary of the 1985 quake, a magnitude 8.1 temblor, which killed thousands of people and devastated large parts of Mexico City.
Much of Mexico City is built on former lakebed, and the soil is known to amplify the effects of earthquakes even hundreds of miles away.
The latest earthquake comes 11 days after a huge temblor killed 96 people.
ends Mexican media broadcast images of several downed buildings in heavily populated parts of Mexico City and nearby Cuernavaca.
A column of smoke rose from a structure in one central neighbourhood in the capital.
Dramatic video showed a mid-rise building collapsing into a cloud of dust. It was not clear whether there were people inside.
Mexico City's international airport suspended operations, saying in a tweet that staff were checking the structures for damage.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here