Focus on 10 buildings

Rescuers swarmed over rubble with shovels and picks yesterday in a frantic search for survivors after Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in a generation, focusing on 10 collapsed buildings where people may still be alive.

Those trapped included five Taiwanese workers in a textile factory in downtown Mexico City. The death toll was at least 273, officials said. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said 50 people were missing.

Working without pause since Wednesday’s 7.1- magnitude quake, first responders and volunteers have saved 60 survivors from central Mexico City to poor neighbourhoods far to the south.

On Thursday, an 8- year- old girl was rescued from a collapsed building in the Tlalpan neighbourhood, nearly 36 hours after the quake, officials said.

The full scale of damage has not been calculated, with buildings across the city of 20 million people badly cracked.

Despite a massive effort by volunteers and the armed forces to gather and distribute food and basic medicines, help has not reached everybody. Thousands of people were sleeping in their cars, rather than going to shelters or damaged homes. that hadn’t happened at the school in at least a day.

Viewers across the country hung on the round- the- clock coverage of the drama on Thursday from the only network that was permitted to enter the area where the school had stood. The military, which ran the rescue operation, spoke directly only to the network’s reporters inside the site.

The Associated Press and others reported about the search for the girl, based on interviews with rescue workers leaving the scene who believed it was true. The workers had been toiling through the night, and the chance of rescuing the girl appeared to give them hope and purpose despite their exhaustion.

Reports about the trapped girl led to the donations of cranes, support beams and power tools at the school site — pleas for help quickly met based on the urgency of rescuing children. It was unclear if that affected other rescue operations going on simultaneously at a half dozen other sites across the city.

Despite all the technology brought to bear at the school, including thermal imaging devices, sensors, scanners and remote cameras, the mistake may have come down to a few over- enthusiastic rescuers who, one by one, crawled into the bottom of shafts tunnelled into the rubble looking for any signs of life.

“I don’t think there was bad faith involved,” security analyst Alejandro Hope said.

“You want to believe there are children still alive down there.”

Rescuers interviewed by the AP on Thursday at a barricade that blocked most journalists from reaching the site believed the story of the girl implicitly. Operating on little sleep and relying on donated food and tools, rescuers were emotionally wedded to the story, and the adrenaline it provided may have been the only thing keeping them going.

Rescue worker Raul Rodrigo Hernandez Ayala came out from the site on Thursday and said that “the girl is alive, she has vital signs,” and that five more children had been located alive. “There is a basement where they found children.”

Despite the setback — and the diminishing hopes that anyone was left under the rubble — rescuers appeared unwilling to question the effort. “It was a confusion,” said Alfredo Padilla, a volunteer rescuer at the school. “The important thing is there are signs of life and we are working on that.”

In retrospect, the story of “Frida Sofia”, had some suspicious points from the start.

Officials couldn’t locate any relatives of the missing girl, and no girl with that name attended the school. Rescuers said they were still separated from her by metres of rubble, but could somehow still hear her.

It could have political repercussions: Education Secretary Aurelio Nuno, often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, had repeated the story about the girl.

Hope noted “something similar happened in 1985”, referring to the magnitude 8.0 quake that killed 9500 people.

Media quickly reported that a 9- year- old boy had been located in the rubble days after the September 19 quake 32 years ago. Rescuers mobilised in a huge effort to find the boy, but he apparently never existed.

“That generated anger against those who had spread the story,” Hope said.