MEXICO CITY: Rescuers frantically searched on Wednesday for survivors of a powerful earthquake that killed more than 200 people in Mexico on the anniversary of another massive quake that left thousands dead and still haunts the country.

At daybreak, fire-fighters, police, soldiers and volunteers were still swarming over the ruins of some 40 buildings that collapsed in the capital.

They had worked through the night after Tuesday’s 7.1-magnitude quake, hoping to find survivors beneath the mangled remains of collapsed buildings, in scenes echoed across a swath of central states.

“We are continuing to search for people,” Mexico City mayor Miguel Angel Mancera told Televisa TV. At least 40 people were found alive in two of the collapsed buildings.

The structures of some 600 other buildings whose walls swayed and cracked were being inspected.

The most agonising search was at a school in the capital where 21 children — aged between seven and 13 — and five adults were crushed to death. At least 30 children were still missing.

“No one can possibly imagine the pain I’m in right now,” said a mother, Adriana Fargo, who was standing outside what remained of the school waiting for news of her seven-year-old daughter.

The nation’s attention was fixed on the school, the Enrique Rebsamen elementary and middle school on Mexico City’s south side.

The woman’s husband was among hundreds of soldiers, police and volunteers who wrestled with the wreckage through the night, trying to extract a teacher and two students found alive beneath the rubble.

One rescuer said there were signs of life in the rubble below. “It seems that some 20 children are safe with a teacher inside a classroom,” the rescuer said as he clambered down from the mountain of bricks, concrete and twisted metal.

There also appeared to be nine lifeless bodies in the debris, he said.

Suspicion was already mounting of shoddy building standards at the school. The three-storey building “ought to have had in-built earthquake resilience”, said geo-science professor David Rothery of the Open University in Britain.

“Had it been properly constructed it should not have collapsed, and I expect questions will be asked about whether the appropriate building codes were adhered to.”

Many residents spent the night in parks and plazas, in tents or makeshift shelters, unable or unwilling to return to their homes as authorities reported 22 aftershocks and urged the utmost public caution.

Published in Dawn, September 21st, 2017