240 Killed by 5.4 Quake in El Salvador : Hundreds Injured, Power Knocked Out; Tall Buildings Fall

An earthquake registering 5.4 on the Richter scale and aftershocks jolted San Salvador on Friday, knocking tall buildings off their foundations, shaking adobe and brick buildings apart, sending terrified residents swarming into the streets and knocking out power and communications. More than 240 deaths and hundreds of injuries were reported.

The death toll was expected to rise. Ernesto Sereiro, an official of the Salvadoran Red Cross, said, “There are hundreds of injured and who knows how many dead.”

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

Hospital Collapsed

The eight-story Bloom Children’s Hospital collapsed, killing about 50 children and burying an undetermined number of others, doctors said.

Radio Cuscatlan reported that the deaths included at least 30 youths whose bodies were found in the ruins of two schools. Other schools were reported damaged as well, and the radio said hundreds of people were injured.

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, repeatedly sent occupants of homes and businesses into the streets of this Central American capital.

Tears and Panic

Panic was the dominant emotion. Men, women and children broke into tears and worried mothers and fathers scurried about the city looking for loved ones. The helter-skelter activity created instant traffic jams, blocking ambulances en route to scenes of destruction.

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.”

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

“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.”

The quake left at least half a dozen office buildings in central San Salvador atilt, collapsing their first floors or bending them in half.

The worst damaged building appeared to be the Ruben Dario commercial structure downtown. Its five-stories pancaked into an unrecognizable heap. The number of persons trapped alive and dead within its ruins was unknown.

“My sister worked there and we don’t know if she was inside, at lunch, or what,” Maria Mina, 25, a bank worker, said. “It is pure terror.”

There are also fears of numerous dead among children at Colegio Santa Catarina, a badly damaged high school in a San Salvador suburb.

The first floor of the six-story Duenas Building and the first two stories of the former Salvador Hotel, now a seven-story office building, collapsed, trapping an unknown number of shoppers and occupants under brick and slabs of concrete.

Across the street from the American Embassy, in a residential district not far from downtown San Salvador, the four-story Profesionales Building sank, collapsing its first floor where a restaurant was awaiting the lunch-hour crowd. Bystanders said that they believed most of the people inside escaped alive, although they saw many being carried away with injuries.

Embassy spokesman Teddy Taylor said 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 the embassy complex was closed and that its operations were temporarily transferred to Corr’s official residence in the suburbs.

The first quake lasted only seconds, but it was strong enough to cause large buildings to jolt upward and groan as they twisted on their foundations.

Many low-rise abode and brick structures in poorer sections of central San Salvador disintegrated. Several streets in the Santa Anita and Modelo neighborhoods were cordoned off by police to keep curiosity seekers and looters away from block after block of shattered homes.

The heaviest destruction occurred in downtown San Salvador around the Metropolitan Cathedral. Damage was also heavy in the San Jacinto neighborhood near the presidential palace.

Volunteer rescuers took to the streets, although many bystanders looked on without trying to help.

“No one is doing anything!” screamed a woman in high heels, standing in front of the Ruben Dario building. She climbed on the rubble and began hurling bricks aside.

Public services suffered widespread damage.

The large Social Security Hospital had to be evacuated of its patients.

“There were cracks in walls everywhere,” Maria de Beltran, a nurse at the hospital, said. “Everyone who could walk, walked out. If they couldn’t walk, we carried them.”

Evacuated patients were placed out on mattresses and blankets in an adjoining parking lot. Nurses strung sheets across the lot to shield them from the sun, and those patients were soon joined by the injured from other parts of the city.

Doctors cleaned and stitched patients wounds in the open air.

“We need tents, antibiotics, water, food, everything,” De Beltran said. She said that the damaged Social Security Hospital contained 250 beds.

The smaller Diagnostic Hospital was also evacuated. And when the quake hit, vacationing Americans Robert Annadle and his wife, Pam Ascanio, were inside a pizza parlor across the street from the Bloom Children’s Hospital.

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

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

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.

Water mains broke in the central party of the city, flooding sidewalks. Electricity was cut soon after the first quake, and cuts in domestic and international telecommunications were frequent.

At least two fires broke out, but they were under control by late afternoon.

Parts of the Pan American highway, one of two major highways in the country, were blocked by landslides, and police issued calls for drivers to stay off streets and highways so that ambulances could reach hospitals.

Radio reports said that there was no major damage outside of the San Salvador area.

Throughout much of the day, the only functioning radio station was that of the Salvadoran armed forces.

American Ambassador Corr was reported to have met with armed forces officials to discuss disaster assistance.

Many people were driven from their homes, and as aftershocks continued to occur, some residents made preparations to spend the night outside. Some brought furniture to the sidewalk and others set up makeshift tents of tablecloths and blankets in vacant lots.

San Salvador, a city of about 1 million inhabitants is situated on the side of a volcano. Small earthquakes are numerous, and people call the area around the capital “the valley of hammocks” because it often sways.