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Reading News 4U: Earthquake death toll climbs to 225 in Mexico as frantic search continues for survivors
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
VietPress USA (Sept. 20th, 2017): Recently on Sept. 7th, 2017 Mexico hit by a grave 8.2 Earthquake near Pijijiapan but less damage. This time a grave Earthquake 7.1 magnitude caused at leat 225 deaths and hundreds injured.
Please read the earlier news on VietPress USA when the Earthquake just striked Mexico yesterday on Sept. 19th, 2017 when a Mexican TV Station broadcasted live and caught the earthquake (http://www.vietpressusa.us/2017/09/a-mexican-tv-news-station-caught-moment.html ).
For more information, please read news from Los Angeless Times at: http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-earthquake-20170920-story.html
VietPress USA News.
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Earthquake death toll climbs to 225 in Mexico as frantic search continues for survivors
September 20, 2017. 7:35AM. Reporting from Mexico City.
Rescuers searched massive piles of
rubble for any signs of life Wednesday morning after dozens of buildings
collapsed across central Mexico in Tuesday’s violent earthquake,
which killed at least 225 people, injured at least 1,000 and caused chaos in
Mexico’s capital.
Firefighters, soldiers and
volunteers worked through the night clearing debris and scrambling to find
survivors, at times working with bare hands and donated flashlights. There were
a few moments of relief when several still-breathing, dust-covered survivors
were pulled from the wreckage and transported to hospitals. But many others were
found dead.
At least 20 children and two adults
died when a three-story school collapsed on the south side of the city. At
least two children had been rescued, but up to 30 others and eight adults were
still missing, said Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. He spoke late Tuesday
outside Enrique Rebsámen school, surrounded by desperate parents waiting for
word on their children.
Pedro Serrano, a volunteer rescue
worker, said rescuers could hear sounds from inside the school but didn’t know
whether they were coming from people crying for help or were the sounds of the
building crumbling.
“We can hear small noises, but we
don’t know,” Serrano, a medical doctor, told the Associated Press. He managed
to crawl into the crevices of the teetering pile of rubble Tuesday. He made it
into a classroom, he said, but found all of its occupants dead.
“We saw some chairs and wooden
tables,” he said. “The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move
rubble, and we found a girl and two adults — a woman and a man.”
Five people were killed at the
Mexico City campus of Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education,
the school said in a statement. Scores more died in collapsed apartment
buildings and office towers.
Amid the chaos of an all-night
rescue operation at one collapsed office building — as ambulances circled with
sirens blaring and firefighters desperately searched the rubble for survivors —
a group of several dozen people pressed against police tape, watching in
anxious silence.
They were the mothers, sisters,
cousins, husbands and wives of people trapped inside the wreckage of the
multistory building, located in the upscale neighborhood of Condesa, in the
center of Mexico City.
Conception Chavez Lopez, 51, had
been waiting outside for seven hours. She had seen more than a dozen
people pulled alive from the wreckage. None had been her son, Gustavo Banda
Chavez, 23, or her brother, Miguel Angel Chavez Lopez, 48, who worked together
in an accounting firm on the building's fourth floor.
Chavez could barely utter her own
name when someone asked it shortly before midnight Tuesday. She and a small
group of relatives kept their eyes desperately trained on the scene in front of
them: firefighters picking their way across a towering heap of bricks, chunks
of concrete and twisted metal, their work illuminated by floodlights.
The 225 people died across five
states as well as the autonomous district of Mexico City, authorities said. At
least 94 died in Mexico City, 43 in Puebla, 71 in Morelos, 12 in Mexico State, 4
in Guerrero and 1 in Oaxaca, they said. Eight hundred people were injured in
Mexico City alone.
With multiple areas without power
and glass and debris strewn across the city, many residents will need help in
the coming days, Peña Nieto said in a video statement. But he said the initial
focus must be on finding people trapped in destroyed buildings.
“The priority at this moment is to
keep rescuing people who are still trapped and to give medical attention to the
injured people,” he said. Across the region, authorities begged for donations
of food and water to help nourish rescuers and for flashlights to help light
the searches that likely would go into Wednesday night.
All Alejandro Santiago hoped, as he
stood watching the office building in Condesa late Tuesday, was that somebody
would say the name of his 28-year-old cousin: Paulina Gomez. That’s all he
wanted to hear.
It would mean that somebody had
found Gomez, a human resources administrator who worked on the fourth floor,
somewhere down there beneath the rubble. It would mean her name could join the
list of people who had been rescued that authorities were writing on a piece of
poster board attached to a light post. But Santiago, 28, had been there two
hours and hadn’t heard anything. So he waited, and watched.
At one point, police had asked the
family members to move farther from the scene. They refused. “We’re not moving until we find out
what happened to them,” he said.
Rescuers searched massive piles of
rubble for any signs of life Wednesday morning after dozens of buildings
collapsed across central Mexico in Tuesday’s violent earthquake,
which killed at least 225 people, injured at least 1,000 and caused chaos in
Mexico’s capital.
Firefighters, soldiers and
volunteers worked through the night clearing debris and scrambling to find
survivors, at times working with bare hands and donated flashlights. There were
a few moments of relief when several still-breathing, dust-covered survivors
were pulled from the wreckage and transported to hospitals. But many others were
found dead.
At least 20 children and two adults
died when a three-story school collapsed on the south side of the city. At
least two children had been rescued, but up to 30 others and eight adults were
still missing, said Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. He spoke late Tuesday
outside Enrique Rebsámen school, surrounded by desperate parents waiting for
word on their children.
Pedro Serrano, a volunteer rescue
worker, said rescuers could hear sounds from inside the school but didn’t know
whether they were coming from people crying for help or were the sounds of the
building crumbling.
“We can hear small noises, but we
don’t know,” Serrano, a medical doctor, told the Associated Press. He managed
to crawl into the crevices of the teetering pile of rubble Tuesday. He made it
into a classroom, he said, but found all of its occupants dead.
“We saw some chairs and wooden
tables,” he said. “The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move
rubble, and we found a girl and two adults — a woman and a man.”
Five people were killed at the
Mexico City campus of Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education,
the school said in a statement. Scores more died in collapsed apartment
buildings and office towers.
Amid the chaos of an all-night
rescue operation at one collapsed office building — as ambulances circled with
sirens blaring and firefighters desperately searched the rubble for survivors —
a group of several dozen people pressed against police tape, watching in
anxious silence.
They were the mothers, sisters,
cousins, husbands and wives of people trapped inside the wreckage of the
multistory building, located in the upscale neighborhood of Condesa, in the
center of Mexico City.
Conception Chavez Lopez, 51, had
been waiting outside for seven hours. She had seen more than a dozen
people pulled alive from the wreckage. None had been her son, Gustavo Banda
Chavez, 23, or her brother, Miguel Angel Chavez Lopez, 48, who worked together
in an accounting firm on the building's fourth floor.
Chavez could barely utter her own
name when someone asked it shortly before midnight Tuesday. She and a small
group of relatives kept their eyes desperately trained on the scene in front of
them: firefighters picking their way across a towering heap of bricks, chunks
of concrete and twisted metal, their work illuminated by floodlights.
The 225 people died across five
states as well as the autonomous district of Mexico City, authorities said. At
least 94 died in Mexico City, 43 in Puebla, 71 in Morelos, 12 in Mexico State, 4
in Guerrero and 1 in Oaxaca, they said. Eight hundred people were injured in
Mexico City alone.
With multiple areas without power
and glass and debris strewn across the city, many residents will need help in
the coming days, Peña Nieto said in a video statement. But he said the initial
focus must be on finding people trapped in destroyed buildings.
“The priority at this moment is to
keep rescuing people who are still trapped and to give medical attention to the
injured people,” he said. Across the region, authorities begged for donations
of food and water to help nourish rescuers and for flashlights to help light
the searches that likely would go into Wednesday night.
All Alejandro Santiago hoped, as he
stood watching the office building in Condesa late Tuesday, was that somebody
would say the name of his 28-year-old cousin: Paulina Gomez. That’s all he
wanted to hear.
It would mean that somebody had
found Gomez, a human resources administrator who worked on the fourth floor,
somewhere down there beneath the rubble. It would mean her name could join the
list of people who had been rescued that authorities were writing on a piece of
poster board attached to a light post. But Santiago, 28, had been there two
hours and hadn’t heard anything. So he waited, and watched.
At one point, police had asked the
family members to move farther from the scene. They refused. “We’re not moving until we find out
what happened to them,” he said.
image.
Tuesday's earthquake jolted the
capital city on the anniversary of a deadly 1985 temblor in the region. Gabriela Jaen Pimienta, 42, lived
with her husband and daughter on the fifth floor of a six-story apartment
building in the Condesa neighborhood that crumbled during the quake.
The husband and daughter, who
weren’t home, survived the disaster. But Miguel Angel Pimienta Avalos, 63, said
his niece was working from home Tuesday morning. Avalos arrived at the scene at
10 p.m. Tuesday to ask about his niece. When the quake hit, he had called every
family member to make sure each was safe. She was the only person who didn’t
answer.
“When I saw the photos on the
Internet, I said, ‘It’s not likely that they’ll get people out,’ ” he said,
looking away as he fought back tears. “Hopefully there is a miracle.”
Just across from the apartments,
medics had turned a building for representatives from the state of Durango into
a makeshift base for family members of those missing. Members of thirteen
families had signed in throughout the night. None of their loved ones had been
found by morning, and most of the families left by daybreak. Ten hours after he
arrived, Avalos was the only person left, volunteering to pass the time, and
praying to God.
Emergency crews worked through the
night. Nurses set up a sidewalk clinic, while others walked around offering
pastries and water. Dozens of people stood watch, their mouths covered with
face masks, as volunteers atop a mountain of rubble passed debris down in
buckets. Others carted rubble away from the ground in wheelbarrows. One rescue
worker brought a yellow Labrador retriever to the top of the pile to sniff out
bodies. Suddenly, workers dimmed the lights, cut off the generators and called
for silence. They listened. A few minutes later, they resumed their work.
Around 7 a.m., workers from the Civil
Protection National System taped off the area closest to the downed building.
As he wrapped police tape around a lamppost, one man said they thought they
might be close to finding a survivor. An hour later, though, no one had been
led out.
Dr. Karen Pina Fragoso said a
handful of people had survived the collapse. Two walked out on their own
Tuesday night, and three or four were rushed to a hospital. She didn’t know how
many adults remained missing in the building, but she said at least three
children were unaccounted for.
Fragoso said medics could still hear
the voices of many survivors trapped in the building at 3 a.m. But as daylight
broke, the voices quieted.
The U.S. Geological Survey
calculated the magnitude of Tuesday’s temblor at 7.1 and said the epicenter was
about 80 miles southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla.
The quake struck 32 years to the day
after another powerful earthquake that killed thousands and devastated large
parts of Mexico City — a tragedy that Peña Nieto had commemorated earlier
Tuesday.
Mexico sits in one of the world’s
most seismically active areas, as the floor of the Pacific Ocean south of the
country is sliding underneath the North American plate. Mexico City is prone to
major damage in earthquakes because it was built on an old lakebed, which
amplifies the shaking.
Tuesday's earthquake jolted the
capital city on the anniversary of a deadly 1985 temblor in the region.
Gabriela Jaen Pimienta, 42, lived
with her husband and daughter on the fifth floor of a six-story apartment
building in the Condesa neighborhood that crumbled during the quake.
The husband and daughter, who
weren’t home, survived the disaster. But Miguel Angel Pimienta Avalos, 63, said
his niece was working from home Tuesday morning. Avalos arrived at the scene at
10 p.m. Tuesday to ask about his niece. When the quake hit, he had called every
family member to make sure each was safe. She was the only person who didn’t
answer.
“When I saw the photos on the
Internet, I said, ‘It’s not likely that they’ll get people out,’ ” he said,
looking away as he fought back tears. “Hopefully there is a miracle.”
Just across from the apartments,
medics had turned a building for representatives from the state of Durango into
a makeshift base for family members of those missing. Members of thirteen
families had signed in throughout the night. None of their loved ones had been
found by morning, and most of the families left by daybreak. Ten hours after he
arrived, Avalos was the only person left, volunteering to pass the time, and
praying to God.
Emergency crews worked through the
night. Nurses set up a sidewalk clinic, while others walked around offering
pastries and water. Dozens of people stood watch, their mouths covered with
face masks, as volunteers atop a mountain of rubble passed debris down in
buckets. Others carted rubble away from the ground in wheelbarrows. One rescue
worker brought a yellow Labrador retriever to the top of the pile to sniff out
bodies. Suddenly, workers dimmed the lights, cut off the generators and called
for silence. They listened. A few minutes later, they resumed their work.
Around 7 a.m., workers from the Civil
Protection National System taped off the area closest to the downed building.
As he wrapped police tape around a lamppost, one man said they thought they
might be close to finding a survivor. An hour later, though, no one had been
led out.
Dr. Karen Pina Fragoso said a
handful of people had survived the collapse. Two walked out on their own
Tuesday night, and three or four were rushed to a hospital. She didn’t know how
many adults remained missing in the building, but she said at least three
children were unaccounted for.
Fragoso said medics could still hear
the voices of many survivors trapped in the building at 3 a.m. But as daylight
broke, the voices quieted.
The U.S. Geological Survey
calculated the magnitude of Tuesday’s temblor at 7.1 and said the epicenter was
about 80 miles southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla.
The quake struck 32 years to the day
after another powerful earthquake that killed thousands and devastated large
parts of Mexico City — a tragedy that Peña Nieto had commemorated earlier
Tuesday.
Mexico sits in one of the world’s
most seismically active areas, as the floor of the Pacific Ocean south of the
country is sliding underneath the North American plate. Mexico City is prone to
major damage in earthquakes because it was built on an old lakebed, which
amplifies the shaking.
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