After deadly quake, 1,000 are missing

The death toll is at more than 400, but at least three survivors were pulled from the dirt.

©Associated Press

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2001

SANTA TECLA, El Salvador -- First there was a blood-chilling scream from atop the mountain. Within moments, a wall of earth was crashing down onto the middle-class neighborhood of Las Colinas below. When the dust cleared, nothing was left of Las Colinas but a flat plain, its silence punctuated by the wails of the injured.

As many as 1,000 people disappeared below the mass of dirt: A woman walking to the store for some eggs. A 12-year-old boy waiting at home for a phone call from his father in Kansas. Three 5-year-olds riding the bicycles they received for Christmas.

Rescuers on Sunday frantically dug with earth-movers, with shovels, with their bare hands to extract mangled corpses -- and at least three people who had miraculously survived.

Around the country, strong aftershocks sent rescuers fleeing from the search for other survivors of an earthquake that killed more than 400 people. But they quickly resumed the desperate hunt for hundreds of missing, using sniffer dogs, shovels and their bare hands.

As the death toll rose from Saturday's magnitude 7.6 quake, President Francisco Flores said he had asked Colombia for 3,000 coffins and officials began to bury some victims in common graves.

Officials said Sunday that more than 1,000 people were missing in the quake, most of them in the Las Colinas area.

The disaster began at 11:35 a.m. Saturday, with a scream. Julio Antonio Ramirez, a bodyguard for a wealthy American woman who lives in a columned white mansion at the top of the hill, was standing in the yard when he heard it.

The earth had begun to shake, lightly at first, but then with a sudden jolt. Someone in a house at the top of the hill let out a desperate scream, and almost simultaneously the hillside gave way in a giant explosion.

Ramirez, 40, watched in awe as a wave of dust swept down from the top of the hill a half-mile into the neighborhood below. It sounded like the crash of the surf, he said.

Next came silence.

And then the grotesque wails of the injured.

"The cries were terrible," he said. "I thought, "This is the end of the road.' "

The dust cloud was so fierce that for a half-hour Ramirez couldn't see a thing. When it began to clear, he couldn't believe his eyes.

The neighborhood below was now a plain of dirt. There was no way of telling where the streets had run, where the houses had stood. All were buried below three stories of dirt.

Miguel Angel Ortega, 34, an importer, was already racing home. He had gone to his ranch to tend to his horses and when the earthquake stuck, he wanted to reach his three sons and his wife. Their seventh anniversary would have been Sunday.

When he arrived the dust had cleared, but it took him several minutes of wandering to figure out where his house had been. He sat down in the dirt to cry, and his gaze met that of the household's only survivor: a white husky named Lobito, or "Little Wolf."

"I called him and he came running to me," Ortega said. "He's all I have left. I'm alone in this world with him."

Sunday, Ortega sat atop what had been his swimming pool, wrapped in a blanket, his boots caked with mud. His eyes were red from crying, and he was waiting for an army crew to arrive to help dig down for his family.

"Ay, my little God. Where are my corpses? That's all I want to know, so I can bury them," he said. "If I had been here it would have been better, because I would be dead."

Saturday's quake off El Salvador's coast was felt from northern Panama to central Mexico -- a distance of more than 1,100 miles. Sunday's aftershocks were centered within a few miles of the capital, according to local seismologists.

Flores said at a news conference that he had asked Colombia for 3,000 coffins, but said it was "premature" to evaluate the damage. In the post-quake chaos, rescuing took precedence over accurate counting.

Red Cross official Mildred Sandoval reported that by late Sunday, the confirmed death toll in the quake nationwide had risen to 403.

National Police counted 2,000 injured, 4,692 houses destroyed and 16,148 damaged, and authorities estimated 1,000 people were still missing. Fearful of the aftershocks that reached magnitude 4.6, many residents of San Salvador slept in the streets or cars, tablecloths or curtains covering windows for privacy.

The nation's main airport reopened Sunday afternoon after being closed more more than a day. That eased the way for more relief.

Pope John Paul II urged international aid for the nation of 6-million.

Mexico was first to send substantial help: five planeloads of food, medicine and 150 specialists. The U.S. followed with rescue crews and supplies.

Offers of assistance came from Germany, Spain, Taiwan, Britain, Panama, even Guatemala, which itself suffered six deaths in the quake.

Guatemala was supplying 40 percent of the electricity used by El Salvador's quake-crippled power grid, up from less than 10 percent.

Police said seven people died in San Miguel, 70 miles southeast of the capital, five of them when a hillside collapsed on coffee-pickers. A prematurely born infant died when the loss of power cut hospital respirators.

Mayor Jose Perez said 95 percent of the houses were badly damaged in Comasagua, 17 miles west of the capital, and he said four people died.

The Red Cross said 13 people died in Sosonati west of the capital and 10 were killed when a landslide buried a bus on a highway east of San Salvador.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright