Mexico Miracles Amid the Ruins

By George Russell

Battered and dazed, Mexico City began the long struggle back from chaos last week. In the center of the world's biggest megalopolis, where the country's worst earthquake in decades had wreaked its most severe devastation, the stench of death hung over piles of rubble. Squads of masked and helmeted rescue workers scrambled desperately, looking for--and sometimes finding --sparks of life in a jumble of concrete and steel debris. There were moments of celebration as the squads retrieved a succession of newborn infants after days of burial. There were also 50 seconds of panic late in the week as a moderate aftershock caused buildings to sway but left little additional damage.

Even as emergency aid poured into the Mexican capital from the U.S. and elsewhere, the cries for help beneath the rubble grew weaker and the death toll continued to mount. So did complaints among Mexicans and some foreign relief workers that the government of President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado had handled the crisis less than adequately.

At week's end the death toll from the Sept. 19 quake had risen to nearly 4,700, including at least five Americans. An additional 30,000 people were injured, and at least 1,500 were missing. The number of homeless in the capital hovered around 40,000. Elsewhere in the country, authorities listed about 300 people as killed or injured. Meanwhile the U.S. National Earthquake Information Service announced that the great quake registered 8.1 on the Richter scale, meaning that it had released three times as much energy as the previously announced 7.8 reading.

The full impact of the calamity was brought home at burial grounds like the dusty San Lorenzo Tezonco cemetery on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. On a typical day last week, hundreds of bereaved relatives filed through San Lorenzo to pay their last respects to loved ones buried in hastily fashioned wooden coffins. Some 170 people were interred during a single day, a total that did not include the mass burial of an unknown number of mangled, unidentified corpses.

Yet the disaster could have been far worse. In much of the 890 sq. mi. of Mexico City, an area that is home to 18 million people, life had returned to something akin to normal last week. The most severe damage was confined to a 13-sq.-mi. zone that encompasses the city's business district. Even there, the pattern of damage was quirky. Said Richard Bonneau, a member of a French rescue team that arrived in Mexico City two days after the quake: "We thought we would find one part of the city destroyed. But it's a building here and a building there."

The helter-skelter pattern of devastation left the city studded with contrasts. The capital's tallest buildings, the Pemex Tower (46 stories) and the Latin American Tower (43 stories), both designed to sway flexibly during an earthquake, were untouched. Less than two miles away, between 50 and 60 employees of the TV network Televisa died when their five-story office building collapsed. About half a mile from that calamity, the nine-story Mexican Insurance Co. building was shattered. Next door, office workers lunched calmly last week at the unmarred Great Wall Chinese restaurant.

In all, city officials now estimate that about 2,500 buildings were destroyed or badly damaged in the original quake and a heavy (7.5 on the Richter scale) second temblor 36 hours later. Many of the buildings that came crashing down were constructed of brick or concrete rather than structural steel. That led to charges by several local critics last week that corrupt building practices had been a major factor in the calamity. The government promised an investigation.

Rescue workers were less concerned with future retributions than with current relief efforts. There they had reason for both hope and frustration. After initial hesitation, the proud Mexicans, who historically have rejected foreign assistance following natural disasters, decided to welcome outside emergency aid. Within two days of the quake, U.S. Air Force C-5A Galaxy, C-141 StarLifter and C-130 Hercules transports were flying into Mexico City's Benito Juarez airport from eight U.S. air bases. Their cargo holds were filled with portable generators, jackhammers, jacks and winches. The planes also ferried in sleeping bags, cots, blankets and, ominously, 5,000 rubberized body bags. By week's end about 350 tons of U.S. supplies had been airlifted, along with some 250 rescue personnel.

Other governments pitched in as well. France sent 280 rescue specialists, including 60 doctors and 30 search dogs. West Germany dispatched 56 members of a disaster-relief unit, along with five paramedics and twelve search dogs, heavy salvage gear, a medical emergency center, a mobile kitchen and medical supplies. From Britain came four London firemen, who brought with them nine thermal cameras, which use infrared sensors to detect the body heat of buried survivors.

Another kind of help came from Nancy Reagan, who arrived in Mexico City with a U.S. Treasury check for $1 million as a down payment on further American relief efforts. During a four-hour, 15-minute visit to the capital, she spent 20 minutes with President de la Madrid at his official Los Pinos residence. Later Mrs. Reagan drove to the residential complex of Tlatelolco, where a 13- story apartment building had collapsed. She commiserated with Spanish Tenor Placido Domingo, who had come to Mexico City to discover the whereabouts of relatives believed to be buried in the ruins of the building.

For American, French, Italian, West German, British, Canadian and Swiss rescue workers, the challenge was grueling and at times gruesome. The din of Mexico City traffic fouled readings on some of their sensitive listening probes; thus the gear was used most effectively at night. When survivors were discovered within the rubble, rescue teams dug long tunnels, frequently by hand, to reach them.

The labor was slow, dangerous and occasionally stomach turning. At times the rescuers had to cut through human corpses to reach the living. Doctors worked for hours in narrow tunnels to amputate limbs before victims could be lifted to safety. The physicians had to operate carefully to avoid so-called crush syndrome, the slow buildup of toxins in the damaged limbs of trapped victims. Without proper treatment, like the intravenous infusion of liquids even before people were freed from the rubble, the condition could result in the death of survivors through kidney failure.

Some of the rescues fully deserved to be called miraculous. At Juarez Hospital, formerly a twelve-story facility, an estimated 800 to 1,200 patients and staff, most of them dead, were entombed within a 50-ft. honeycomb of debris. Rescuers swarmed over the wreckage. Now and then the demand came for absolute silence as the searchers listened for survivors. Nearly seven days after the quake, wavering cries were heard on what had been the fifth floor. A U.S.-Mexican team of miners tunneled toward the sound--and eventually reached the target.

With the afternoon light fading, the first of three babies, all girls, was lowered in a wire rescue basket down a long ladder to ecstatic applause and cheers. Miners hugged one another. Some medical experts felt that the excess fat and surplus water in the tissues of the newborn had helped them to survive for such an extended period. They also assumed that the infants, having so recently emerged from the darkness of the womb, were less subject than older children or adults to the stress of being buried alive.

The experts suggested that the greatest danger to the babies during their ordeal had been cold. Mexican doctors speculated that dying adults in the wreckage near them had shielded the infants from the chill and passed on the margin of warmth necessary for survival. In any case, said Dina Villanueva Garcia, chief of the neonatology department of Juarez Hospital, "it was extraordinary that they survived." In all, about 15 infants and 166 adults had been rescued at Juarez Hospital by week's end, and two babies had been rescued at another hospital after nearly nine days of entombment.

Other small miracles abounded. In the city's Colonia Roma district, a residential area adorned with scatterings of art nouveau and art deco architecture, Ramona Saldana Martinez, 30, described her survival after the collapse of a six-story apartment building. She and two of her children were removed from the wreckage after 22 hours. Said Martinez: "My mother died instantly. My twelve-year-old son also died. The wall and the ceilings came down on us, but I could breathe. I stripped some wallpaper to let the air come in."

Many of the foreign rescuers had unstinting praise for their Mexican counterparts. But as the week wore on, complaints grew among the outsiders about the disorganization and hesitancy of the Mexican effort. Said a member of a French rescue unit known as Les Taupes (The Moles): "It got to the point where we were practically pleading with the Mexican government to let us save someone." Many Mexicans were equally critical. They wondered, for example, why President de la Madrid had waited 39 hours after the earthquake before addressing the nation on television. The government, said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a Mexican foreign policy expert, "refused to recognize the dimensions of the tragedy the first day, so many lives were lost. They went around in circles."

Among other things, the foreigners echoed complaints by some Mexicans that almost 4,000 troops guarding the devastated areas did little or nothing to assist in the rescue effort. Moreover, Mexican officials were allegedly more anxious to bulldoze ruined buildings than to proceed with the painstaking / rescue work, apparently out of the mistaken fear that decomposing corpses in the ruins would cause epidemics. Carl Heinz Wolbert, a West German police detective and volunteer rescue expert, wept in frustration at the resulting delays. Said he: "We can touch the people who are trapped. In Mexico it is impossible to get them out. In Germany it would be very possible." Admitted a senior Mexican official: "In situations like this, every minute counts, and we lost many, many minutes."

As time continued to slip away, the odds against retrieving many more survivors lengthened. That did not stifle the efforts of the rescuers. But as a steady stream of bodies moved toward local cemeteries and damage estimates rose as high as $2 billion to $3 billion, Mexican officials began looking ahead to the next stages of the relief operation, which include relocation and health services for the living and the city's eventual reconstruction. In one sense, Mexico City had been lucky: key industrial sectors of the city were undamaged by the quake, meaning that the impact of the disaster on the national economy was less than some had feared.

For years the government has talked of decentralizing Mexico City. The rebuilding effort may offer an opportunity. Presidential Press Spokesman Manuel Alonso Munoz has already said that only those government offices that can justify their need to stay in the capital will be rebuilt there. Even so, as President de la Madrid warned his fellow citizens, the cost of recovery will be "enormous." The process will also take years.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira and Andrea Dabrowski/Mexico City