Signs of life emerge in collapsed school
Signs of life found in collapsed school
They’re alive!” shouted a rescue volunteer searching for survivors in a collapsed school following an earthquake as machines and men dug through the rubble. It was all that the team of rescuers needed to hear to keep the search going. It was all that anguished parents needed to cling to hope that their children were still alive.
MEXICO CITY—“They are alive! Alive!”
Rescue volunteer Enrique Garcia’s shout broke the sound of digging as rescuers continued an agonizing search for survivors at a school south of Mexico City that collapsed at the height of the 7.1-magnitude quake, killing 26 people—21 of them children.
The quake death toll across parts of Mexico hit by the quake was 233 as of Thursday and was expected to further rise.
Garcia, 37, said he heard sounds of life coming from the rubble of the collapsed school.
“Someone hit a wall several times in one place, and in another there was a response to light signals,” he said.
“We have been at this since yesterday, but we cannot reach them because they are trapped between two slabs,” Garcia added.
So far, 11 children and at least one teacher had been rescued from the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen elementary and middle school.
Firefighters, police, soldiers and volunteers worked frantically to remove rubble in scenes repeated across a swath of central states in Mexico’s second killer earthquake this month.
The most agonizing search was at the school.
Unimaginable pain
Rescue workers were desperately trying to reach several children believed to be alive beneath the wreckage in the early hours of Thursday—some 36 hours after the quake struck. Using a thermal scanner, they had located signs of life in several locations.
“No one can possibly imagine the pain I’m in right now,” said a woman, Adriana Fargo, who was standing outside what remained of the school waiting for news about her 7-year-old daughter.
In the Condesa neighborhood, Karen Guzman sat on a stool in the street with her back to one of the collapsed buildings.
She said she could not bear the tension of the search for around 30 people thought to be under the rubble, among them her brother.
Beside her were two street poles tagged with lists of rescued people, but they did not include the name of her brother Juan Antonio, a 43-year-old accountant whoworked on the top floor of the four-story building.
“My mom is looking for him in hospitals because we don’t trust those lists. Sometimes I think nobody knows anything,” she said.
Emergency workers reported that some victims had been rescued thanks to WhatsApp messages they sent to relatives while trapped under the debris.
Rescue teams were helped by thousands of ordinary civilians who dug through the rubble alongside them.
Other Mexicans took to the streets with food and water for victims and emergency workers.
President Enrique Peña Nieto toured the hardest-hit areas and declared three days of national mourning.
“The priority remains saving lives,” he said in a national address, insisting there was still hope of pulling survivors from the rubble.
More than 50 people have been rescued from collapsed buildings in the capital, he said.
Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said 39 buildings in the capital had fallen.
Five Taiwanese were trapped in a three-story building that had collapsed in the city, according to Taiwan’s foreign ministry.
Many residents were spending a second night in parks and plazas, in tents or makeshift shelters, unable or unwilling to return to their homes as authorities inspected some 600 buildings whose walls swayed and cracked when the quake struck. —