The rumbling had ended and the rubble had settled when Manuel Zambrano, 21, took stock of his situation: Somehow, he was alive.
Moments earlier, he had been at his job in a pharmacy on the ground floor of a three-story building. Suddenly, the building began to shake and finally collapsed around him. He found himself trapped in a pocket within the debris.
It was dark. He heard sirens, shouts, crying.
“I thought it was the end,” he said, standing near a mound of concrete and plaster that had once been the building. “But I remembered the 33 trapped miners in the mine in Chile and thought that if they could survive so many days, I could do it, too.”
At least 413 people died and more than 2,000 were injured in the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck Ecuador late on Saturday, the biggest to hit the nation in decades, leaving a stretch of ruin through provinces bordering the Pacific coast. The tremors flattened buildings, fractured highways and knocked out electricity to much of the region.
On Monday, residents were still digging through the rubble for survivors and victims, the government was scrambling to find shelter for thousands of people left homeless and rescue crews from around the world had begun arriving in the Andean nation to help.
Portoviejo, a city of nearly 300,000 people and the provincial capital of Manabi Province, was hit particularly hard, with officials reporting more than 100 deaths and at least 370 destroyed buildings. Survivors described how the earthquake, from one moment to the next, turned a normal, placid evening into a disaster zone.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s office reported that rescue crews were flying in from Latin America as well as from Europe. Hundreds of aid workers from abroad were already in the disaster zone by Monday morning, with the largest contingents so far including 120 from Mexico, 80 from Spain and 49 from Chile, officials said.
In some of the worst-hit areas, like sections of Portoviejo, the Ecuadorean military set up cordons to restrict traffic and to allow rescue personnel to work more easily. The authorities were also concerned about further collapses in the event of aftershocks. At 1:30pm, a magnitude 4.6 tremor hit, sowing panic, including among the rescue workers, who feared that the vibrations might topple structures that had already been compromised by Saturday’s earthquake.
On Monday evening, a Colombian rescue team pulled a man from the wreckage of the Hotel El Gato in Portoviejo. The man, Pablo Cordoba, 38, the administrator of the hotel, told the rescuers that there might be another person alive in the wreckage.
Cordoba said that for more than half a day after the earthquake, he carried on a conversation with another person who was trapped elsewhere in the wreckage; the two could hear, but not see each other.
The other victim had gone silent around noon on Monday, Cordoba said. The Colombian rescue team — using tools, hands and an excavator, and working in near total darkness — started pushing deeper into the debris hoping to find another survivor.
Fabiola Carreno, 35, her clothes covered in dust and her face wrought with anxiety, spent the day searching likely locations for her cousin, Jenny Carreno, 24, and her cousin’s six-year-old daughter, Kiara Villafuerte. At one point, Carreno was unsuccessfully trying to persuade soldiers at a blockade to let her pass so that she could search for her relatives in the wreckage of a collapsed building.
She held a photograph of her cousin in her hand.
“We have to look for them,” Fabiola Carreno said. “We have to identify them, but they are not letting us.”
The soldiers were unmoved.
“We know that we are not going to find them alive, but we want to bury their bodies,” she said of her relatives.
The Ecuadorean military began distributing food rations across the affected region of the nation, including water and cooking oil.
Fausto Ortega, 58, rode for more than an hour on his bicycle across Portoviejo and into the city’s suburbs looking for some bread for his family’s breakfast.
“The situation is very anxious, because we have to look for ways to survive during these next few days,” he said. “My wife is scared to enter the house and prefers to sleep in the street, because the house can fall.”
“We are poor and need help, but nobody has come to bring us even a glass of water or a grain of rice,” he added. “We have been told to go to the shelter, but we are not going to leave the little that we have unguarded.”
The Spanish Red Cross, which is helping its counterpart in Ecuador, estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 people have been left homeless by the earthquake and need temporary shelter, the group said in a statement.
However, for one group of people living in Manabi Province, the earthquake turned out to be a fortuitous event. Amid the tremors on Saturday, a wall at the El Rodeo state prison fell down, giving prisoners an escape route. According to local news reports, about 180 inmates fled through the hole and into the night, although by Monday, about 30 had been recaptured.
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