Mexico digs through rubble as quake kills 225

Mexico City, September 20 

Rescue workers scrabbled through piles of rubble on Wednesday in a harrowing search for dozens of children feared buried under a Mexico City school, among hundreds of buildings destroyed by the country’s most lethal earthquake in a generation. 

The magnitude 7.1 quake on Tuesday killed at least 225 people, nearly half of them in the capital, 32 years to the day after a devastating 1985 quake. Mexico is also still reeling from a powerful tremor that killed nearly 100 people in the south of the country less than two weeks ago. 

Among the twisted concrete and steel ruin of the Enrique Rebsamen school, soldiers and firefighters found the bodies of at least 22 children and two adults, while another 30 children and 12 adults were missing, President Enrique Pena Nieto said. The public school is for children aged 3 to 14. 

Hundreds of neighbours and emergency workers spent the night pulling rubble from the ruins of the school with their bare hands under the glare of floodlights. Three survivors were found at around midnight as volunteer rescue teams known as “moles” crawled deep under the rubble. 

On Wednesday morning, the workers said a teacher and two students had sent text messages from within the rubble. Parents clung to hope that their children were alive. "They keep pulling kids out, but we know nothing of my daughter," said 32-year-old Adriana D'Fargo, her eyes red, who had been waiting for hours for news of her seven-year-old. 

Overnight, volunteers with bullhorns shouted the names of rescued kids so that tense family members could be reunited with them. 

The earthquake toppled dozens of buildings, tore gas mains and sparked fires across the city and other towns in central Mexico. Falling rubble and billboards crushed cars. Even wealthier parts of the capital, including the Condesa and Roma neighbourhoods, were damaged as older buildings buckled. Because bedrock is uneven in a city built on a drained lake bed, some districts weather quakes better than others. Parts of colonial-era churches crumbled in the adjacent state of Puebla, where the US Geological Survey put the quake's epicentre some 100 miles southwest of the capital. 

Residents of Mexico City, home to some 20 million people, slept in the streets while authorities and volunteers distributed food and water at tented collection centres. Other volunteers, soldiers and firefighters formed human chains and dug with hammers and picks to find dust-covered survivors and bodies in the remains of apartment buildings, schools and a factory. With each layer of rubble that was removed, workers pled onlookers and volunteers for silence, desperate to hear the sound of any survivors below. — Reuters

Shaky Ground

• For the second time in two weeks, a powerful earthquake struck Mexico. Two major quakes in the same country within a short span of time may sound rare, but it’s not a surprise in such a seismically active region in the world
• Mexico sits on top of three of the Earth’s largest tectonic plates — the North American, Cocos and Pacific plates. The latest tremor occurred near the boundary between the North American and Cocos plates, where the latter slides beneath the former
• It also falls on the 'Ring of Fire', a horseshoe shaped area around the edges of the Pacific Ocean, from Australia to the Andes, along which 90% of all earthquakes occur
• According to the US Geological Survey, the country has seen 19 quakes of at least 6.5 magnitude within 155 miles of the epicentre of Tuesday’s quake over the past century

VW shuts facility 

Carmaker Volkswagen AG temporarily shut its sprawling Puebla factory, its biggest outside of Germany, due to structural damages from the quake. 

VOLCANO ERUPTS 

Around the same time that the earth shook, Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano, visible from the capital on a clear day, had a small eruption. On its slopes, a church in Atzitzihuacan collapsed during Mass, killing 15 persons, Puebla Governor Jose Antonio Gali said.

What they say

God bless the people of Mexico City. We are with you and will be there for you

— Donald Trump, US president

Devastating news from Mexico City. My thoughts are with those affected by today’s earthquake -- Canada will be ready to help our friends.

— Justin Trudeau, Canadian PM

In this moment of pain, I want to express my closeness and prayers to all the beloved Mexican people 

— Pope Francis