180 Dead in 5.4 Quake in El Salvador : Scores Are Injured; Buildings Sway, Power Knocked Out

A strong earthquake and aftershocks wrecked scores of homes, schools and office buildings in El Salvador on Friday, sending terrified residents swarming into the streets and knocking out electric power and communications. At least 180 deaths and scores of injuries were reported.

Radio station YSU of San Salvador said the 10-story Ruben Dario commercial building collapsed with 1,000 people inside. By late afternoon, 150 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage. It was not known how many others were stilled trapped in the rubble.

Another Salvadoran radio report, monitored in Guatemala, reported that 30 students at Colegio Santa Catarina, a high school, were killed when the building collapsed.

5.4 on Richter Scale

The U.S. Geological Survey at Golden, Colo., said that an earthquake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale, centered about 10 miles northwest of San Salvador, struck at 11:40 a.m. Salvadoran time.

Seven or eight aftershocks, measured by the Guatemalan Seismological Station in Guatemala City at intensities between 4.5 and 4.9 on the Richter scale, were felt here over the next three hours.

President Jose Napoleon Duarte declared a state of national emergency, saying, “The magnitude of the disaster has caused a state of calamity in the whole country.”

Gaping cracks opened in San Salvador’s streets, and the San Salvador Hotel and the Flor Blancas National Stadium reportedly were heavily damaged.

Major Highway Cut

The Pan American highway, one of two major highways in the country, broke apart near the coast south of San Salvador, and police issued calls for drivers to stay off streets and highways so that ambulances could reach hospitals.

“The streets are congested because many houses came down,” Guillermo Valenci, a Salvadoran journalist said in an interview with a Colombia radio station. “There are people crying, children running in search of their parents, old people doddering about without any idea of where they are.”

Helicopters flew over the city, carrying aid to victims and lifting the injured to hospitals, already jammed with victims. City parks were converted into makeshift shelters for the injured and for the large number of people who fled their homes.

In neighboring Honduras, television station HRN repeated a plea from the Salvadoran Health Ministry for emergency supplies of plasma, blood, medicine and bandages.

Duarte appealed for “tranquility” among his countrymen during a five-minute national radio broadcast monitored in neighboring Guatemala.

“I was in Bolivar (in eastern El Salvador), when I learned of the earthquake,” he said. “I immediately returned to the capital to take measures protecting the population.”

Dazed residents wandered the littered streets of this capital. A young woman clutched a bleeding child to her breast as she searched for medical help.

Vacationing Americans Robert Annadle and his wife, Pam Ascanio, who were inside a pizza parlor when the quake hit, said the temblor damaged Bloom Children’s Hospital across the street.

“They were digging out (from the hospital) kids, babies,” said Ascania, of Rockledge, Fla.. “I helped carry a dead baby.”

‘The Roof Fell’

“We were the only ones who got out (of the pizza parlor) when it was happening. The roof fell,” she said.

Some buildings were reduced to bent and twisted steel, and officials said other buildings in this city of more than 500,000 people might collapse later.

Volunteers dug in the rubble toward victims trapped in a store where a five-story building collapsed.

Some high-rise buildings sunk into the ground, and remnants of broken glass hung in their window frames. Streets were strewn with downed power lines and glass shards.

Shanties of tin and wood collapsed in poor districts, but middle and upper class neighborhoods in the hills appeared not to have suffered heavily. Radio reports said that most of the damage occurred in the southern sections of the capital.

Urgent Call

An official of the Salvadoran Health Ministry told station YSU that many injured were being admitted to hospitals. He made an urgent call for doctors and nurses to report immediately to duty.

Patients lay on mattresses in the parking lot of the Social Security Hospital, and nurse Maria Beltran said that the hospital needed tents, food and medicines.

A soldier standing guard said that four people were slightly hurt at the U.S. Embassy, located in a residential district not far from downtown San Salvador. Embassy spokesman Teddy Taylor said, however, that he know of no injuries to Americans working at the embassy.

It was impossible for reporters to gauge damage to the embassy complex, shielded for security reasons behind high concrete walls. U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr had accompanied Duarte on his trip to the eastern part of the country.

A State Department spokesman in Washington said later that embassy complex was closed and that its operations were temporarily transferred to Corr’s official residence in the suburbs.

Fallen Balcony

A four-story building housing a restaurant across the street from the embassy had collapsed and its balcony had fallen on the restaurant patio, but no one appeared to have been caught there.

Taylor of the U.S. Embassy said that he understood damage to the presidential palace, where Duarte has his offices, was “substantial.”

The Spanish news agency EFE reported that outside of the capital, the severest damage occurred in Santa Ana in the western part of the nationa. There was no immediate estimate of casualties in Santa Ana.

Many areas of San Salvador were without electricity, and communications interruptions were frequently.

Felt in Guatemala

The Guatemalan Seismological Station said the quakes were felt strongly in Guatemala City as well, but there were no reports of damage in that neighboring Central American country.

Central America and Mexico lie along the Pacific Coast’s so-called “Rim of Fire”--an earthquake-prone region because of its location on the fracture where two earth plates meet.

The two deadliest earthquakes in Central America this century both occurred in the 1970s. A quake Dec. 23, 1972, in Nicaragua killed an estimated 10,000 people, and one on Feb. 4, 1976, in Guatemala and Honduras killed 22,778. The most serious recent earthquake in Latin America killed 10,000 people in Mexico City in September, 1985/