Shaken but OK; Jackson native, family experience major quake in Mexico

Tremors are common in Arriaga, Mexico.

Ron Mouser lives there with his wife Ivonne and their five young children. It's in Chiapas, the southernmost -- and poorest -- Mexican state, near the Guatemalan border and about a half-hour from the ocean.

Mouser is a missionary, not a seismologist, but had become comfortable with the tremors over his two decades in Mexico.

"You just wait 20 seconds," he said.

That's what they did about 11:40 p.m. Thursday, when their aging hacienda-style home began to shake.

"But it just got worse and worse," he said. "All of a sudden, my wife is praying. Picture frames are falling off the walls, the television, all the furniture in the house is moving away from the walls."

Mouser grew up in Jackson and still can remember hand-wringing in his hometown about the nearby New Madrid fault line.

"That's nothing," he said Monday in a telephone interview. "This was the biggest thing I've ever felt in my life."

The earthquake that pounded the Chiapas region Thursday was the second-largest one in recorded history in Mexico.

"I've heard some people were saying it was an 8.2," he said of the magnitude. "The Mexican government was saying it was an 8.4."

The distinction made little difference to Ron in his boxer shorts midnight Thursday as he and Ivonne scrambled to herd their children to the patio.

"There's stucco and pieces of the walls and bricks are falling on us as we're trying to get out. It never stopped shaking," Mouser recalled.

Conventional American earthquake protocol, he said, does not apply in Mexico. He recalled being taught in the U.S. to wait out a quake in a "triangle of safety."

"A lot of Mexican houses are made differently than U.S. houses. It's a lot of old brick with stucco. These are basically concrete structures," he said. "There's no 'triangle of safety' here. You're gonna get buried under a thousand pounds of pavement."

The patio, he said, seemed the best available option. Any doubts were left unspoken.

"I remember thinking, 'You know, I don't even know we're safe here,'" he said.

He learned later three people in a neighboring town had been killed in similar circumstances.

"They ran out in their yard, and a wall fell on them," he said. "Praise God, as close as we are, I don't know anyone who was killed in our city. We stayed all night there in the courtyard."

While the shaking was more than he'd anything he'd felt, Mouser said he was reassured by the optimism of his 6-year-old son, Judah.

"We're gonna be fine, right? Because God has us in his hands, right?" Judah asked.

"And I said, 'Yeah,'" Mouser said. "And we are OK. I feel the Lord really has been gracious with us."

The shaking went on for hours -- until almost 11 a.m.

Even when it stopped, he said they couldn't be sure.

"It just messes with you mentally," he said. "Is the ground still shaking, or is it just my nerves?"

In the morning, they left Arriaga for a mountain town about 40 miles away. They still could feel the tremors, real and imagined.

"Whenever there's a movement in the ground, my kids freak out and want to run outside," he said. "We've had to take glasses of water and set them out all over the house. That way, when you think you feel something, if the water's not moving, you know it's just nerves."

Their house is still standing, but Mouser said they won't be going back.

"We were in the process of moving anyway. Our house was already pretty much a mess," he said. "I don't really feel safe [in the house] anymore, so we're pushing forward our moving date."

The quake killed more than 90 people. Mouser said it would have been worse if it had happened during daylight. Because it struck at night, it is a blessing, he said.

And the church where he served, El Rebano del Senor is still standing.

To help the children process the trauma of the event, the Mousers turned Sept. 7 into "Earthquake Day."

"We're shaken, and it is unnerving, but we have had peace despite the horribleness of the whole situation," he said. "We're marking it on our calendars as a day to tell funny stories about Dad running outside in his boxer shorts."

tgraef@semissourian.com

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