Rescuers in grim search for survivors

Rescuers dug Thursday for survivors of a 7.1-magnitude earthquake that killed at least 233 people in Mexico, as the nation watched anxiously for signs of life at a collapsed school in the capital.

Firefighters, police, soldiers and volunteers worked frantically to remove rubble in scenes repeated across a swath of central states in Mexico's second killer earthquake this month.

The most agonizing search was at a school in the south of Mexico City where 21 children - aged between seven and 13 - and five adults were crushed to death. Many children were still missing.

Rescue workers were desperately trying to reach several children believed to be alive beneath the wreckage in the early hours of Thursday - some 36 hours after the quake struck. Using a thermal scanner, they had located signs of life in several locations.

"They are alive! Alive!" shouted Civil Protection volunteer Enrique Garcia, 37. "Someone hit a wall several times in one place, and in another there was a response to light signals," he said.

"We have been at this since yesterday, but we cannot reach them, because they are trapped between two slabs."

So far, 11 children and at least one teacher have been rescued from the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen elementary and middle school.

"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.

In the Condesa neighborhood, Karen Guzman sat on a stool in the street with her back to one of the collapsed buildings. She said she could not bear the tension of the search for around 30 people thought to be under the rubble, among them her brother.

Beside her were two street poles tagged with lists of rescued people, but they did not include the name of her brother Juan Antonio, a 43-year-old accountant who worked on the top floor of the four-story building.

"My mom is looking for him in hospitals because we don't trust those lists. Sometimes I think nobody knows anything," she said.

Source: Khaleej Times