A former Port Elizabeth woman living in Puebla in Mexico spoke of the horror and fear when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit the country on Tuesday.
Farah Ortiz (nee Harri) of Malabar in Port Elizabeth has been living and teaching at a school in Puebla, where her husband, Gerardo Ortiz, works at the local Volkswagen plant in the city.
In a series of messages to her mother Nadia in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Ortiz described the ordeal as "horrible, horrible, horrible."
She said children at the school where she has been teaching since August, "were scared and crying". "A lot of things fell down but no one was hurt," she wrote.
Ortiz said that the situation was "very traumatic and there were two (tremors), one moving vertically and (the) other horizontally."
She said about an hour before the quake struck, the city of Puebla held an earthquake "drill “to mark the anniversary” of the devastating 1985 quake which left thousands of people dead.
Meanwhile, Mexican officials said on Wednesday that at least 149 people were killed in Tuesday's earthquake.
The country's civil protection agency said that the highest death toll was in the state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City, where 55 deaths were reported while in the state of Puebla, south of Mexico City, 32 people were killed while 10 were left dead in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital.
Three people also died in the state of Guerrero, on the Pacific coast.
