MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Most schools in Mexico City remained closed on
Monday after last week's deadly earthquake, but children outside the capital
were set to return to their classrooms, although aftershocks were still jolting
the country.
Search operations in the Mexican capital were narrowed to a handful of
buildings destroyed by the 7.1 magnitude earthquake last Tuesday that killed at
least 320 people.
The quake rendered thousands of people homeless with many of them
living in tents in the streets or emergency shelters, but there were signs that
the 20 million people living the greater metropolitan area were gradually resuming
their routines.
"Our neighbourhood is in mourning," said Deborah Levy, 44,
from trendy Condesa district that was among the worst hit. "Some
neighbours and friends got together (Sunday). We went to eat to cheer ourselves
up, looking for a little normality."
Some of the most affected neighbourhoods, those built on top of a soft
ancient lake bed, still had entire blocks cordoned off.
More than 44,000 schools in six states were due to reopen on Monday,
but only 103 of them in Mexico City, which suffered most of the fatalities.
Officials said they did not want to impede relief efforts, so more than
4,000 public schools and nearly as many private schools in the capital will
remain closed for now.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico, with 350,000 students at
campuses in and around Mexico City, will resume classes on Monday.
Of 6,000 damaged buildings, some 1,500 have yet to be inspected, said
Horacio Urbano, president of Centro Urbano, a think tank specializing in urban
issues and real estate.
Ten percent of the damaged buildings were constructed after 1990, by
which time strict building codes had been enacted in the wake of the 1985
earthquake that killed some 10,000 people.
Search operations, using advanced audio equipment to detect signs of
life beneath tonnes of rubble, continued at a few buildings with help from
teams from as far afield as Israel and Japan.
At a school in southern Mexico City where 19 children and six adults
had been reported killed, officials recovered the body an adult woman on
Sunday.
The search for survivors continued in a ruined office building in the
Roma neighbourhood and in a five-story apartment building in historic Tlalpan.
Authorities called off efforts in the upper-middle class Lindavista
zone after pulling 10 bodies from the rubble over several days, and work at the
Tlalpan building was briefly halted on Saturday by a magnitude 6.2 aftershock.
Another 5.7 aftershock struck on Sunday off the west coast, jolting
southwestern Mexico, and seismologists predicted more tremors to come.
While aid and volunteer workers have flooded into the accessible
districts of Mexico City, people in more remote neighbourhoods and surrounding
states have received less attention.
Miguel Angel Luna, a 40-year old architect, joined a caravan of
civilians that headed out late last week to help isolated communities scattered
around the base of the Popocatepetl volcano in the state of Morelos.
Around 40 percent of the adobe homes he saw in poor villages had been
completely destroyed and some 80 percent were heavily damaged, Luna said.
"We're talking about very poor communities," Luna said.
"They don't have tools, they don't have materials, they don't have money
to rebuild."
(Additional reporting by Michael O'Boyle;
Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
Comments
Post a Comment