As many as 60 people were feared to have died yesterday after a landslide swallowed a bus in Puebla state in central Mexico.
Emergency workers expressed little hope of recovering any survivors, as the army worked alongside them overnight at the sight of the accident to dig up the bus.
The first body, of a 40-year-old woman, was recovered by rescuers late on Wednesday more than 12 hours after the accident, Puebla Governor Mario Marin said.
PHOTO: AP
Though it took several hours for rescue operations to begin, more than 400 soldiers, firefighters and other rescue workers eventually arrived. By 8pm the bus had been located, according to Miguel Monterrubio, a spokesman for Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
The accident happened around 7:45am on a mountainous road between Tlacotepec de Porfirio Diaz and Zoquitlan in the Sierra Negra, a remote region of forested mountains at the juncture of the states of Puebla, Oaxaca and Veracruz.
Witnesses said 300m of the road was covered by large boulders and earth in a landslide that came after heavy rains the night before. The crush of earth pushed the bus off the road and nearly 150m down a ravine, where it disappeared under the mud, rocks and trees.
Most of the passengers were from small farm towns in the municipality of San Miguel Eloxochitlan and were on their way to the largest town in the area, Tehuacan, to market their goods and to pick up an annual agriculture subsidy from the government, people from the town said.
Rosario Trujillo, a town official, said the bus had been full as it left Tlacotepec 20 minutes before the tragedy. Local people rushed to try to reach and free the bus with shovels and sticks, but the police warned them off.
"The hill is still falling, and the authorities will not let us put more people in danger," she was quoted as saying by the daily Reforma.
Miguel Angel Rodriguez, a shopkeeper from a nearby village who tried to help, said: "Everyone is buried. People cannot dig because huge rocks keep falling down."
Six hours after the bus was buried, no ambulances or heavy equipment had arrived, said Eduardo Sedeno, a spokesman for the newspaper El Mundo in Tehuacan.
As the afternoon wore on, Calderon ordered the army and the Interior Ministry to help.
But it was not until 4pm that two earth movers arrived and began to excavate, said Jesus Portillo, a spokesman for the Puebla state civil protection agency.
Rains and other mudslides made it hard for heavy machinery to reach the site.
Carmen Garcia Montes, the Red Cross director in Tehuacan, said she sent two ambulances in the morning, but the paramedics had trouble reaching the site and could do little once they got there "because half the hill had slid down."
Relentless rain has arrived in recent days with the start of the annual rainy season, causing minor flooding and occasional mudslides in many parts of Mexico.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers. A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited,
RSS