Hope remains for finding more survivors
MEXICO CITY — Survivors are still being pulled from rubble in Mexico City as rescue operations stretch into a fourth day Friday, spurring hope among desperate relatives gathered at the sites of buildings collapsed by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake.
Mexico’s federal police said several people were lifted out of the debris of two buildings Thursday. Rescuers removed or broke through slabs until they found cracks that allowed workers to wiggle through to reach the victims. The city government said 60 people in all had been rescued since the quake hit at midday Tuesday.
Still, with the hours passing, fewer of the living were being found, and the official death toll rose to 286, with more than half, 148, in the capital. National Civil Defence chief Luis Felipe Puente tweeted early Friday that there were also 73 deaths in the state of Morelos, 45 in Puebla, 13 in Mexico, six in Guerrero and one in Oaxaca.
The time was nearing when rescuers would be replaced by bulldozers to clear rubble, but officials went to great pains to say it was still a rescue operation.
Puente acknowledged that backhoes and bulldozers were starting to clear away some wrecked buildings where no one had been detected or where teetering piles of rubble threatened to collapse on neighbouring structures.
“It is false that we are demolishing structures where there could be survivors,” Puente said. “The rescue operations will continue, and they won’t stop.”
Those who witnessed buildings collapse said the tragedy could have been much worse. Some buildings didn’t fall immediately, giving people time to escape, and some shattered but left spaces where occupants survived. In other cases, the salvation seemed almost miraculous.
Security guard Felix Giral Barron said that after the quake started, he had time to run and tell people to evacuate his building. Then an entire apartment building across the street crumbled and a big tank of heating gas on it slid off, but didn’t explode.
At the site of a collapsed sevenstorey building in Mexico City’s Roma Norte neighbourhood, rescue efforts were suspended overnight as rain drenched the area and destabilized the pile of rubble.
Workers were eager to restart Friday morning under overcast but dry conditions — as soon as experts could confirm it was safe to do so.