Mexicans dig as quake toll rises
217 dead, 40 buildings destroyed, children trapped
MEXICO CITY residents worked through the night into the early hours yesterday, digging through immense piles of pancaked rubble that had once been high-rise buildings, searching for survivors of a devastating earthquake that killed more than 200 people across central Mexico – more than half in the capital.
They worked in the dark and often with bare hands, with power out across 40% of this city of 20 million and rescue and medical services stretched to the limits.
Volunteers, medics and marines worked side by side to clear away the chunks of concrete in the dusty air. Everywhere in the city, they formed lines to pass along containers filled with rubble and dump them into waiting trucks.
Cries of “silence” punctuated the work as people listened in hope for the sounds of survivors under the wreckage.
At least 44 buildings collapsed or partly collapsed in Mexico City alone, according to mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera.
The 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck 120km south-east of the earthquake-prone capital at 1.14pm local time, according to the US Geological Survey, and came on the 32nd anniversary of the infamous 1985 quake that killed thousands.
The head of Mexico’s civil protection agency, Luis Felipe Puente, put the toll at 217, revising it down from earlier estimates.
Even as residents were trapped inside buildings across the city and in the surrounding towns, attention was riveted on a collapsed school in the southern neighbourhood of Villacoapa, where rescuers pulled 25 bodies from the wreckage – all but four of them children. More are believed to be under the wreckage.
Rescue worker Pedro Serrano described how he tunnelled into the unstable rubble to a partially collapsed classroom, only to find no one alive. “We saw some chairs and wooden tables. The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move rubble and we found a girl and two adults – a woman and a man.”
Late on Tuesday night, President Enrique Peña Nieto urged calm in a video message, saying “the priorityis to keep rescuing people who are still trapped and to give medical attention to the injured people”.
He said 40% of the capital and 60% of the neighbouring Morelos state were without power.
The president had been travelling to the southern state of Oaxaca to inspect damage from an earlier earthquake when the latest one occurred.