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.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
RSS