"My little cousins are inside, before there were noises, screams. We
must find them," pleaded Isaac, 18, as the firemen combed the debris.
Shaken Ecuador hunts for survivors amid 7.8 quake debris(DNA India)
Traumatized Ecuadoreans slept amid rubble while rescuers dug for survivors on Monday after an earthquake smashed the Andean nation's coastal region, killing at least 272 people and flattening resort towns.
Saturday's
7.8 magnitude quake ripped apart buildings and roads, knocked out
power, and injured at least 2,068 people in the largely poor Andean
country.
In the devastated beach town of
Pedernales, shaken survivors curled up for the night on mattresses or
plastic chairs next to the rubble of their homes. Soldiers and police
patrolled the hot, dark streets while pockets of rescue workers plowed
on.
Late on Sunday, firefighters entered a
partially destroyed house to search for three children and a man
apparently trapped inside, as a crowd of 40 gathered in the darkness to
watch.
"My little cousins are inside, before there were noises, screams. We must find them," pleaded Isaac, 18, as the firemen combed the debris.
Tents
sprung up in the town's still-intact stadium to store bodies, treat the
injured, and distribute water, food, and blankets to survivors. People
wandered around with bruised limbs and bandaged cuts, while patients
with more serious injuries were evacuated to hospitals.
Leftist President Rafael Correa, who cut short a visit to Italy, surveyed the damage in the coastal province of Manabi on Sunday night.
"Ecuador has been hit tremendously hard,"
Correa said in a televised address, his voice breaking as he said he
feared the death toll would rise from what he called a tragedy.
While the full extent of the damage remains unclear, the disaster will likely worsen the OPEC nation's economic performance this year.
The small, oil-dependent country has already been battered by the tumble in crude prices.
Its
crucial energy industry appears largely intact after the quake, though
its main refinery of Esmeraldas was closed as a precaution. However,
exports of bananas, flowers, cacao, and fish could be slowed by ruined
roads and delays at ports.
The quake could also alter political dynamics ahead of next year's presidential election.
AFTERSHOCKS
About
230 aftershocks have rattled survivors, who huddled in the streets,
worried the flow of tremors could topple their already cracked homes.
"We're scared of being in the house," said Yamil Faran, 47, surrounded by some 30 people in the middle of a street in the city of Portoviejo. "When this improves and the aftershocks stop we're going to see if we can repair it."
Some
130 inmates in Portoviejo took advantage of the quake's destruction and
chaos to climb over the collapsed walls of the low-security El Rodeo
prison. More than 35 prisoners had been recaptured, authorities said on
Sunday night.
About 13,500 security personnel were
mobilized to keep order. Beyond a handful of unconfirmed reports of
theft and looting, the country appeared calm.
Some $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders was immediately activated for the emergency, the government said.
Domestic
aid funds were being set up and Venezuela, Chile and Mexico were
sending personnel and supplies. The Ecuadorean Red Cross mobilized more
than 800 volunteers and staff and medical charity Medecins Sans
Frontieres said it was sending a team from Colombia.
Two
Canadians were among the dead. Jennifer Mawn, 38, and her 12-year-old
son Arthur, died when the roof of their coastal residence collapsed.
Residents on the Galapagos islands far off Ecuador's coast and home to numerous rare species, said they had not been affected.
The
tremor followed two large and deadly quakes that struck Japan since
Thursday. Both countries are located on the seismically active "Ring of
Fire" that circles the Pacific, but according to the U.S. Geological
Survey large quakes separated by such distances would probably not be
related.
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