Hope dwindles for quake victims
Rescuers start to end wreckage searches
MEXICO CITY — Five days after the deadly magnitude 7.1 earthquake, the hulking wreckage of what used to be a seven-story office building is one of the last hopes: One of just two sites left where searchers believe they may still find someone trapped alive in Mexico City.
Among the families of the missing, there are moments when spirits lift. A flurry of activity, or relatives are summoned to the search site, raising hopes that someone has been found. But despair deepens when the work slows or stops and as day after day passes without loved ones emerging.
For the family of Adrian Moreno, 26, a missing human resources worker at an accounting firm, the emotional roller coaster is getting to be too much. Moreno’s mother has a look of anguish and has largely stopped being able to speak. His boyfriend, Dario Hernandez, also looks lost, his gaze tear-stained and unfocused.
“Just hearing the earthquake alarm was horrible,” Hernandez said of a siren that rang during a 6.1 quake Saturday that was an aftershock of an even earlier and bigger temblor on Sept. 7.
A total of 38 buildings in the Mexican capital collapsed in the Sept. 19 earthquake, and the first days saw a dramatic scramble to reach survivors.
Mexican marines said they had recovered 102 bodies and rescued 115 people alive from buildings toppled by the quake, which has killed 320 people including 182 in the capital alone, according to the latest death toll announced Sunday.
Thousands more have been left homeless because their houses or apartment buildings have been rendered too dangerous to remain.
Inspections of the city’s nearly 9,000 public and private schools have only barely begun. Federal Education Secretary Aurelio Nuno said Sunday that only 103 schools had been approved to resume classes Monday.
One by one the searches have closed in recent days, after sniffer dogs were sent in and didn’t find life and thermal imaging devices turned up no body heat signatures.