Video‘No one can imagine the pain’: buildings crumble as magnitude 7.1 earthquake hits Mexico, killing at least 217
The quake came less than two weeks after another left nearly 100 dead in the country’s south, and on the anniversary of a 1985 tremor that killed thousands in the capital
Rescue teams kept up a desperate search on Wednesday for survivors of a powerful earthquake that killed at least 217 people in Mexico on the anniversary of another massive quake that still haunts the country.
Soldiers, police and civilian volunteers worked through the night after Tuesday’s magnitude 7.1 quake, hoping to find survivors beneath the mangled remains of collapsed buildings in Mexico City and across a swathe of central states.
“The armed forces and federal police will continue working non-stop until every possibility of finding more people alive is exhausted,” Interior Minister Miguel Osorio Chong said on Twitter.
The most agonising search was at a school in the capital where 21 children and five adults were crushed to death, and where at least 30 children were still missing.
“No one can possibly imagine the pain I’m in right now,” said one mother, Adriana Fargo, who was standing outside what remained of the school waiting for news of her seven-year-old daughter.
The nation’s attention was fixed on the school, the Enrique Rebsamen elementary and middle school on Mexico City’s south side.
Hundreds of soldiers, police and volunteers wrestled with the wreckage through the night trying to extract a teacher and two students found alive beneath the rubble.