Mexico City: Police, firefighters and ordinary Mexicans dug frantically through the rubble of collapsed schools, homes and apartment buildings, looking for survivors of Mexico's deadliest earthquake in decades as the number of confirmed fatalities stood at 248. Last week's magnitude-7.1 quake struck on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands. Just hours earlier, people around Mexico had held earthquake drills to mark the date.
One of the most desperate rescue efforts was at a primary and secondary school in southern Mexico City, where a wing of the three-story building collapsed. Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble.
Volunteer rescue worker Dr Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble that had been Escuela Enrique Rebsamen. He made it into a classroom, but found all of its occupants 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,” he said.
“We can hear small noises, but we don't know if they're coming from above or below, from the walls above (crumbling), or someone below calling for help.” A mix of neighbourhood volunteers, police and firefighters used trained dogs and bare hands to search through the school's rubble. The crowd of anxious parents outside the gates shared reports that two families had received WhatsApp messages from girls trapped inside, but that could not be confirmed.
The federal education department reported that 25 bodies, including that of four adults, had been recovered from the school's wreckage. It was not clear whether those deaths were included in the overall death toll of 217 reported by the federal civil defense agency. Pena Nieto had earlier reported 22 bodies found and said 30 children and eight adults were reported missing.
In a video message, Pesident Pena Nieto urged people to be calm and said authorities were moving to provide help as 40% of Mexico City and 60% of nearby Morelos state were without power. But, he said, “the priority at this moment is to keep rescuing people who are still trapped and to give medical attention to the injured people.”
Mexico City mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said buildings fell at 44 sites in the capital alone as highrises swayed and hundreds of thousands of panicked people ran into the streets.
Long lines of volunteers passed chunks of debris from hand to hand at a collapsed clothing factory where several people died. When a person was hauled out alive, they broke into shouts of “Yes, we can!” Carlos Mendoza, 30, said two people were pulled alive from the ruins of a collapsed apartment building in the Roma Sur neighbourhood during a three-hour period.
Blocks away, Alma Gonzalez was in her fourth-floor apartment when the quake collapsed the ground floor of her building, leaving no way out. She was terrified until her neighbors mounted a ladder on their roof and helped her slide out a side window.
