Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Rescue workers, residents search earthquake ruins in Mexico City
Death toll at least 225; survivor hunt ongoing at fallen school
MEXICO CITY — Rescue workers and residents in Mexico’s capital searched frantically Wednesday for survivors of a powerful earthquake that turned high-rise buildings into piles of rubble and caused the collapse of a school attended by hundreds of children.
The 7.1-magnitude quake, which struck Tuesday afternoon, killed at least 225 people across central Mexico, but there were fears that the death toll would rise. The quake is Mexico’s deadliest since 1985.
The rescue effort included people from all walks of life in Mexico City, where social classes seldom mix. Doctors, dentists and lawyers stood alongside construction workers and street sweepers, handing buckets of debris or chunks of concrete hand-tohand down the line.
Even Mexico City’s normally raucous motorcycle clubs swung into action, using motorcades to open lanes for emergency vehicles on avenues crammed with cars largely immobilized by street closures and malfunctioning stoplights.
Power was being restored in some Mexico City neighborhoods that had been left in darkness overnight, and officials reported that the sprawling transit system was running at near-normal capacity. Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said there were 38 collapsed buildings in the capital alone, down from the 44 he had announced previously.
Amid the recovery efforts, attention was riveted on the private elementary school in the southern part of the capital, where rescuers worked into the night in an attempt to reach a child who survived the earthquake.
Helmeted workers labored throughout the day, sometimes calling for silence to listen for any voices from the wreckage as they tried to reach the girl at the Enrique Rebsamen school. Three rescuers were seen entering the rubble.
Rescuers spotted the girl and shouted to her to move her hand if she could hear them, and she did, according to Foro TV. A search dog was then sent into the wreckage to confirm she was alive.
A wing of the three-story building had collapsed into a pancake of concrete slabs. Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble, covered in sheets.
Rescuers used wooden beams to shore up the fallen concrete slabs so they wouldn’t collapse further and crush whatever air spaces remained.
Volunteer rescue worker Dr. Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble at the school. He made it into a classroom but found everyone inside dead.
“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,” he said. All were dead.
“We can hear small noises, but we don’t know if they’re coming from … the walls above, or someone below calling for help,” he said.
However, workers did manage to rescue dozens of children from the wrecked school Tuesday and early Wednesday, Mexican news media reported. The daily El Universal described how one schoolgirl sent her parents a plea for help on the WhatsApp messaging service from her cellphone.
“I’m fine, I am trapped with four other kids, help us, we’re thirsty,” read the message, which reached her mother on Tuesday evening, six hours after the school collapsed, the newspaper said. She was later saved.
The federal Education Department reported late Tuesday that 25 bodies had been recovered from the school’s wreckage, all but four of them children. It was not clear whether those deaths were included in the overall death toll reported by Mexican authorities. President Enrique Pena Nieto had earlier reported 22 bodies found at the school and said 30 children and eight adults were reported missing.
“There are around 600 children at the school,” said Elena Villasenor, 44, who lives near the school. “We
don’t know how many children are still inside. They were in classes. The school was full.”
As Mexico City residents pulled together in solidarity, Parque Mexico in the badly affected Condesa neighborhood became a campsite for people without shelter as well as a dropoff point for blankets, food and medicine.
Tuesday’s temblor nearly came two weeks after an even larger quake took place off the Pacific coast and shook the south of the country, killing almost 100 people. Scientists said the same large-scale tectonic mechanism caused both events: The larger North American Plate is forcing the edge of the Cocos Plate to sink. The collision generated both quakes.
Mexico is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes. The country is in a region where a number of tectonic plates butt up against one another, with huge amounts of energy waiting to be unleashed.
Mexico City is partially built on old lake sediment, which is much softer than rock. The seismic waves can be amplified when traveling through the sediment, said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Geological Survey’s model for estimating earthquake damage predicted 100 to 1,000 fatalities and economic losses of between $100 million and $1 billion for a temblor of this scale and proximity to population centers.
The quake shook Mexico City so hard that the murky, stagnant waters of the city’s ancient Xochimilco canals turned into churning pools of waves. Videos posted to social media showed tourists in flat-bottomed tour boats struggling to stay in their seats and hold on to their beers.
Pena Nieto declared three days of national mourning even as authorities made rescuing the trapped and treating the wounded their priority. “Every minute counts to save lives,” Pena Nieto tweeted.
In the town of Jojutla, dozens of buildings collapsed, including the town hall. One building was rocked off its foundations and part of it went into a river.
Pena Nieto visited Jojutla and said brigades would be going door-to-door to make sure homes are safe.
At a wake in Jojutla on Wednesday for Daniel Novoa, a toddler killed when his home collapsed, family members bent over a white coffin surrounded by a crucifix and images of Mexico’s patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Alongside was a larger, open coffin for the child’s aunt, Marta Cruz.
In Atzala in Puebla state, villagers mourned 11 family members who died inside a church when it crumbled during a baptism for a 2-year-old girl. People at the wake said the only ones to survive were the baby’s father, the priest and the priest’s assistant.