Mexico’s moles won’t give up
KEEPING HOPE ALIVE: VOLUNTEER RESCUERS KEEP BURROWING IN RUBBLE FOR SURVIVORS
Since late Friday, only bodies have been recovered, but they won’t stop yet.
Ismael Villegas is on holiday, but you wouldn’t know it. He spends his time digging through the rubble of a building that collapsed in Mexico’s earthquake last week. Villegas is a “topo”, the Spanish word for mole – volunteer rescuers who tunnel into the concreteand-steel mountains of collapsed buildings, looking for survivors and dragging them out.
It is a tradition that dates back to the earthquake in 1985 that killed more than 10 000 people and flattened hundreds of buildings in Mexico City.
That earthquake overwhelmed the government’s emergency services, leaving civilian volunteers to fill the void. Those original moles developed a new technique for extracting people from collapsed buildings.
It involves crawling into the cavities, then tunnelling horizontally through the wreckage floor by floor, looking for air pockets where people may be alive. It is faster and less expensive, but far more dangerous, than the standard technique, which involves working down vertically through a collapsed building. “Our tech- nique is to dig tunnels. That’s why they call us moles,” said Villegas.
When last Tuesday’s earthquake shook Mexico City, Villegas was 700km away, in Oaxaca, helping clean up damage caused by an earlier quake on September 7. As soon as the ground stopped shaking, he jumped in his car and rushed back to Mexico City, where reports were emerging of collapsed buildings with people trapped inside. “I got here at two in the morning and jumped straight into the rubble. My team and I managed to get seven survivors out,” he said.
Villegas has not budged since from this pancaked seven-story building in Roma district, one of the worst scenes of destruction in a disaster that killed 330 people.
He estimates there are about 200 moles in Mexico. They are, by definition, volunteers. When a major earthquake strikes – not just in Mexico, but around the world – they take time off from work and rush to the disaster zone.
There is little hope of finding more survivors of the 7.1-magnitude quake as since late Friday, only bodies have been recovered. But the moles refuse to give up. “We’ve rescued survivors from the rubble after a week, even more,” said Villegas. –