The 39 Seconds: An Eternity of Terror

It was 3 a.m. in Guatemala City when Genaro Castro was jolted awake by the thunderously loud rumble of buckling earth and masonry. Grabbing his terrified and screaming child, he stumbled over the shifting floor of his adobe house to the door. A pressure beyond his frantic strength held it shut. While he was still grappling with the door, the front wall of his home crashed outward into the street, leaving Castro and his son standing exposed but unharmed. They had just survived one of the century's most destructive natural disasters.

The massive earthquake (7.5 on the Richter scale) that racked Guatemala lasted only 39 seconds, but to its victims that seemed an eternity of terror.

When the tremors subsided, more than 300 towns throughout the country had been destroyed. The Guatemalan government announced that more than 8,000 people were dead and 40,000 injured; unofficial estimates ran as high as 20,000 dead, 60,000 injured and hundreds of thousands homeless.

Cut off by fallen power lines, collapsed bridges and roads blocked by landslides, many towns in the mountainous north and northwest were stranded last week without food or medical supplies. Starvation and disease were expected to add to the death toll before roads could be cleared to bring in aid.

Rescue efforts were further slowed last Friday when the country was whiplashed by an afterquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale. Both quakes also rocked neighboring Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico, but no deaths were reported there.

In Guatemala City (pop. 1.5 million), damage ranged from cracked walls and broken windows in middle-class residential areas to the total destruction of entire blocks in the adobe-hut districts of the poor. Hundreds of corpses, covered only by thin sheets or plastic, lined the streets the morning after the initial quake. Surgeons from the capital's General Hospital performed operations--often without adequate equipment--in a field tent set up outside the damaged hospital.

Eating Rats. Many of the city's homeless spent chilly nights in the streets camping under tents that had been made from salvaged sheets and tablecloths. Even those whose homes were left standing slept on the pavement or in parks rather than remain in buildings that continued to tremble from the afterquakes. Food and water were scarce. By week's end what stores remained open had either stopped extending credit or raised prices beyond the reach of most of the city's poor.

Many said that they had not eaten since the quake struck, and crowds fought to get near the few public taps that still trickled water. "They're eating rats and anything else they can get their hands on," said one Red Cross official who reached Guatemala's devastated interior by helicopter.

In the town of Mixco, ten miles northwest of Guatemala City, TIME Photographer Dirck Halstead saw policemen trying to dig out bodies of prisoners who had been buried under the rubble of a collapsed jail. In San Pedro Sacatepequez, 15 miles north of the capital, more than 1,500 had been buried; the precise death toll was unknown because government officials, fearing a typhoid epidemic, ordered that the dead be buried quickly, often before the corpses could be identified. Several mourners who went to bury their dead in family plots found that the coffins of long-dead relatives had been uncovered by the quake. One woman wept and chanted among the graves while her husband buried the unearthed bones of his father and the corpse of his son. Another family marked the grave of their child with his favorite toy--a transistor radio that was left playing sporadic news of the disaster.

The United Nations Disaster Relief Organization mobilized aid for Guatemala last week, coordinating the efforts of both governments and international relief agencies. The United States sent a 100-bed portable hospital staffed by 24 American doctors, 500 tents, twelve 3,000-gallon water-storage tanks, electric power generators, blood plasma and antibiotics. Nicaragua, which lost more than 10,000 people in an earthquake that virtually destroyed its capital of Managua three years ago, set up a military airlift for food and medical supplies. By week's end, however, almost no relief supplies had reached victims in the hardest-hit parts of the interior. The extent of their need could only be signaled by the clouds of dust that rose above the rubble of their towns.

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