Reconnaissance Report on Mexicali

By Benson Shing, Andreas Stavridis, Juan Murcia-Delso, Flavio Mosele, Ioannis Koutromanos, Hussein Okail, and Gabriele Guerrini.

April 2010, UC San Diego.

The reconnaissance team visited Mexicali on April 7, 2010. The city is 29 miles north of the epicenter according to the information from USGS, and has a population of about 650,000 (Wikipedia) not including those in the greater metropolitan area. There are not many tall buildings in the city and the tallest ones are around 8 to 10 stories. According to the information provided by the Civil Protection Department of Mexicali and the USGS website, the maximum ground acceleration recorded in Mexicali was about 0.21g. At the time of the visit, structural damage had been identified in 103 buildings in the city. The team visited mainly the downtown area, and inspected (1) The General Hospital (GH) and ISSSTE General Hospital “5 DE DICIEMBRE” (IS), (2) Instituto Salvatierra Secundaria, a private high school (HS), (3) The Federal Building (FB), (4) A partially collapsed precast concrete parking structure (PS) that was under construction, (5) The University of Baja California campus (UC).