Earthquake!

Image courtesy of Hoy, shows damage to Mexican building after the quake.(click image for site)

It's blazing all over the news: a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Baja California yesterday evening, so powerful it even rocked the LA county as well.

The tremor, estimated to have lasted anywhere between 30-45 seconds, was so widespread that at least 20 million people felt the shaking.

Although the epicenter was located south of the border, earthquake coverage this morning (as with this ABC 7 clip) mainly focused on damages to buildings in the San Diego county, las with cities like Calexico and El Centro.

After about an hour of the repetitive information shown on these newsclips, I was pretty surprised to note that once I switched the channel to Univision, certain key points had been omitted in the ABC 7 and Fox newscasts.

For one thing, Univision's  reporting pretty much focused on the direct damage to buildings in Mexico.

This is not to imply that the effects to southern California were left out (after the all, the tremor was felt even in Bakersfield). It's just a mindblow (for me at least) to come to terms with the fact that in emergency situations like these, it's a staggering advantage from a reporting perspective to possess the type of coverage accessibility where language is not a barrier. It really makes a difference in reporting, because for me as a viewer, I kind of felt like I was almost getting a different perspective of how things were going once I heard the same news, but in Spanish.

But I guess this is all relative. I mean, I'm pretty sure that if I were to understand French I would probably experience, or rationalize the details to the Haiti earthquake in a different manner as well.

Another thing, during the morning segment in Univision, one of the reporters was interviewing an expert, summarizing the basics of the quake (where, when, how). Once more, what I found interesting (and different) to the previous news coverages I'd seen, was a fact that seemed to have been left out in other news clips I'd seen so far in English. This expert really stressed a key point in all of this:collaboration. He explained that because the quake happened in such close proximity, because so many people felt it across the U.S./Mexico borders, and because to this day --and in the days following --the ground is still prone to aftershocks, nothing will help out more than to be on the same page and to implement a solid flow of information between U.S. and Mexican geologists.