|
| date = November 1917 to January 1918 | time = | duration = | magnitude = 5.6 (25 December 1917) | depth = | location = | type = | affected = Guatemala | damages = | intensity = | pga = | tsunami = | landslide = | foreshocks = | aftershocks = Several | casualties = 250 dead }} The 1917 Guatemala earthquake was a sequence of tremors that lasted from 17 November 1917 thru 24 January 1918. They gradually increased in intensity until they almost completely destroyed Guatemala City and severely damaged the ruins in Antigua Guatemala that had survived the 1773 Guatemala earthquakes. == History == The seismic activity started on 17 November 1917 and ruined several settlements around Amatitlán. On 25 and 29 December of the same year, and on 3 and 24 January of the next, there were stronger earthquakes felt on the rest of the country, which destroyed a number of buildings and homes in both Guatemala City and Antigua Guatemala. Sometimes the movement was up and down, then sideways. And at every new shock a handful of houses went down as if they had been built of sand. In most of the houses, walls cracked in two and then roofs fell in; in churches, bell towers crashed down, burying adjacent buildings and their occupants. Among those buildings destroyed by the earthquakes were a lot of the infrastructure built by general José María Reyna Barrios and president Manuel Estrada Cabrera, whose legacy has been forgotten by Guatemalans. The ''Diario de Centro América'', a semi-official newspaper owned in part by President Estrada Cabrera, spent more than two months issuing two numbers a day reporting on the damage, but after a while, started criticizing the central government after the slow and inefficient recovery efforts. In one of its articles, it went as far as to tell that some holy Jesus images from the City had been saved because they had been taken away from their churches after the first earthquake as they "did not want to stay anymore in a city where excessive luxury, impunity and terror were rampant". Likewise, the newspaper complained that the National Assembly was issuing "excellent" laws, but nobody was "going by the law". Finally, on its front page of May 1918, it complained that there was "still debris all over the city". The ''Diario de Centro América'' itself was print in the rubble, in spite of which it was able to issue its two daily numbers. The French magazine ''L'Illustration'' on its 12 January 1918 issue reports on a telegraph cable from 31 December 1917 that Guatemala city had been completely destroyed: two hundred thousand people was left homeless and there were about two thousand deaths. The magnificent monuments the city had were lost. In 1920, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden arrived to Guatemala on a trip along Central America; his journey took him to Antigua Guatemala and Guatemala City where he saw firsthand that the recovery efforts were still not done and the city lied still in ruins. There was still dust whirling in thick clouds, penetrating everywhere -clothes, mouth and nostrils, eyes and skin pores-; visitors got sick until they got used to the dust; the streets were not paved and only one in three houses was occupied, as the others were still in ruins. Public buildings, schools, churches, the theater, museums were all in the hopeless state of desolation in which they were left by the earthquake. Bits of roof hung down the outsides of the walls and the footway was littered with heaps of stucco ornaments and shattered cornices. A payment of some hundred dollars would secure that a house that had been marked as unsecure with a black cross was then deemed as done with its necessary repairs, allowing the owners to leave the houses empty and in ruins. It was at the Guatemala City General Cemetery that the utter devastation was most evident: all was demolished on the night of the earthquake and it was said that something like eight thousand dead were literally shaken from their graves, threatening pestilence to the city and forcing the authorities to burn all of them in a gigantic bonfire. The dark cavities of the empty tombs were still opened in 1920 and no attempt had been made to restore the cemetery to its original condition. Finally, Prince Wilhelm, pointed out that the world had sent help in the form of money and goods, which arrived by shipload in Puerto Barrios, but neither helped the city because millions found their way to the President's treasury and his ministers sent provisions to Honduras and sold them there for a good profit. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1917 Guatemala earthquake」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|