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Victims buried en masse
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AUTHORITIES buried many of the victims of El Salvador's earthquake in mass graves, saying a landslide that wiped out entire families had made it impossible to identify all the dead.
Distraught relatives lined up on Monday at an improvised morgue in a bloodstained alley to identify some of those mangled and entombed in Saturday's quake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale. But the need to dispose of the mounting number of corpses cheated some of the chance to say farewell.
One woman looking for a pair of missing cousins showed up at the morgue in the half-buried Las Colinas neighbourhood only to find out that two children who matched their description had already been sent to a mass burial.
With no refrigerated facilities, and bodies and body parts piling up in the alley near the quake-triggered landslide that covered Las Colinas in a wall of dirt, there was little choice but mass burial, said coroner Mario Alfredo Hernandez.
About half the corpses were unidentified, he said.
President Francisco Flores asked Colombia to send 3,000 coffins. Later he appealed to his countrymen to stay calm, assuring them that the earthquake would not trigger more disasters.
Many of the victims were buried under massive mudslides triggered by the biggest quake to hit this coffee-growing nation of 6.2 million people for at least a decade.
But at least one person, an 80-year-old woman, died after being stung repeatedly by a swarm of bees disturbed by the quake.
Despite frequent aftershocks of up to magnitude 5, rescuers, masked for protection against air-borne disease and the smell of decomposing bodies, used dogs, picks, shovels and their hands to recover bodies and limbs.
They said chances were fading of finding more survivors beneath the earth and rubble.
The quake, whose epicenter was off the Pacific coast, about 105km southeast of the capital, was felt in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras and as far north as Mexico City. (SD-Agencies)
‘Am I going to die?'
ONE of the last survivors found alive under the debris was a 22-year-old amateur musician who was rescued on Sunday after being trapped for 30 hours. He was kept alive with oxygen as rescuers dug under a fallen wall inside a friend's home.
“I cannot breathe. Am I going to die?” Sergio Moreno asked his rescuers outside San Salvador in Santa Tecla, where the quake triggered what appeared to be its most destructive avalanche, burying about 500 homes.
“I'll be taking care of you from above,” he said at one point, according to his friend Douglas Angel.
Hospital officials said they had little hope that Moreno, who had heart and kidney failure and needed a leg amputated, would live.(SD-Agencies)
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