More Than 400 Dead in San Salvador Quake : 6,000 Hurt, 20,000 Are Homeless, Red Cross Reports; American Embassy Heavily Damaged

International rescue crews, equipped with hammers, chisels and faint hopes, worked into the night Saturday to dig the living and dead from ruined buildings as San Salvador counted its losses from a devastating earthquake.

The International Red Cross reported that about 400 people were killed, 6,000 were injured and more than 20,000 were left homeless by the quake that struck Friday morning and the dozens of aftershocks that followed.

Gen. Adolfo Blandon, chief of staff of the Salvadoran armed forces, confirmed that more than 400 had died and said: “I think this figure will rise as rescue work progresses. . . . In view of the size of the catastrophe, I am certain that the figure will rise.”

Morgue Report

Blandon toured the stricken areas of the capital Friday morning.

A justice of the peace, Rosario Goches, said that 300 bodies were brought to the city morgue. Some were claimed by relatives; others were buried in public cemeteries after being kept for 12 hours, she said.

Earlier, a shirt-sleeved President Jose Napoleon Duarte, appearing at a news conference at the military headquarters in the capital, said: “We don’t know how many other dead are in fallen buildings. What is beyond doubt is that the material damage is colossal.”

Among public buildings severely damaged was the U.S. Embassy. Embassy spokesman Gillespie said the three-story, gray building was rendered unusable. The embassy staff members who reported for work Saturday did so at the residence of Ambassador Edwin Corr in the capital’s western suburbs.

In Washington, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams said the embassy is likely to be “permanently unusable.” He also said no reports have been received of deaths or serious injuries among the estimated 2,800 Americans living in El Salvador.

Duarte and other government officials wondered aloud how they would repair the large sections of the city that were hard hit. Several downtown buildings were badly damaged, and numerous adobe and brick houses in poor neighborhoods in the south of the city were destroyed.

“Rebuild this city?” asked Communications Minister Julio Rey Prendes. “How? With what resources?”

As night fell in the capital’s downtown, which was eerily dark for lack of electricity, firefighters from El Salvador, the United States and Guatemala tunneled into the fallen heap of the Ruben Dario Building, once a five-story commercial building, now a tomb for many dead--and perhaps a few survivors.

Michel Hidalgo waited anxiously. “They’ve taken out some dead and some alive, but not yet my husband,” she said. Her spouse, Carlos, worked in the building and has not been heard from since the quake struck at 11:49 a.m. Friday, local time.

A few blocks away, Red Cross rescuers were responding to a report that voices had been heard at the bottom of the Duenas Building, where the first floor had caved in.

“People hear and people invent,” Rigoberto Serpas, a civil engineer at the site, said. “We have to check anyway.”

Meanwhile, relief supplies, rescue teams and expressions of sympathy began pouring in from around the world. In Reykjavik, Iceland, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said President Reagan interrupted preparations for his summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to order an airlift of emergency aid to San Salvador.

The President expressed his sympathy and promised in a telegram to Duarte “to help in any way we can,” Speakes said.

Foreign Shipments

The first shipments of foreign aid arrived at Ilopango air base early Saturday. Jacob Gillespie, a U.S. Embassy spokesman, said that five U.S. military C-130 airplanes had arrived bringing emergency supplies and equipment, including generators, emergency lamps, cots, sheets and blankets, as well as food and medical supplies. The planes also brought jackhammers and chisels for use by rescuers searching damaged buildings for victims.

Other planes bearing aid were also en route from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru, Switzerland, Japan and Spain, as well as from neighboring Honduras and Guatemala.

At his news conference, Duarte, citing data from a government seismic institute, said that the quake began along a fault that runs from San Jacinto Ridge, on the city’s southern outskirts, through downtown San Salvador and ending several miles to the north.

Mexican Comparison

On Friday, the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center at Golden, Colo., measured the earthquake at 5.4 on the Richter scale. By comparison, the major earthquake that devastated Mexico City in September, 1985, was measured at 8.1 on the Richter scale, and it and a second tremor claimed an estimated 10,000 lives.

Since the quake and the first strong aftershock Friday, about 250 aftershocks of varying intensity have jolted San Salvador.

Duarte said that most public buildings in the Salvadoran capital had sustained some damage. The Ministry of Planning building, behind the presidential palace, caved in, he added. Other government officials said that two occupants of that building died, 20 were pulled out alive and dozens more may be left inside, they said.

Duarte also said that many of the city’s hospitals have suffered structural cracks.

Hospital Evacuations

Three of the city’s six major hospitals--the Social Security Hospital, the Benjamin Bloom Children’s Hospital and the Military Hospital--had to be evacuated.

In central San Salvador, only Rosales Hospital continued to operate. While two large outlying hospitals are also intact, a scarcity of beds and equipment forced the government to set up temporary hospitals in open fields and parks. Duarte said that three temporary hospitals with 200 beds each would soon be set up inside the city, and a Western diplomat said that portable hospitals are being flown here from the United States and Japan.

At the Bloom Hospital, a 400-bed institution, fears that scores of children were trapped in a three-story diagnostic and supply annex proved unfounded, said Rolando Dominguez, the hospital’s assistant director.

Dominguez said that the annex, which was eventually flattened, did not collapse during the jolting first temblor, giving patients and personnel time to flee.

“The building came down during the second tremor and kept coming down in subsequent quakes,” he said, adding: “We will have to rebuild it entirely. The hospital cannot be used.”

Many of the young patients were taken to hospitals in nearby towns. The remaining patients were sheltered under tents in a schoolyard near the hospital. Babies and small children lay on mattresses, while nurses and doctors tended to them with intravenous equipment and medicine. The makeshift tent hospital also treated other emergency cases among the quake’s victims.

The ruling Christian Democratic Party’s headquarters was destroyed, as were a restaurant and office building across the street from the damaged U.S. Embassy.

In the San Jacinto district, residents said that more than 30 of the 80 girls enrolled at the Santa Catalina school were killed when parts of the building collapsed. Two of the children were buried in graves at the site.

17 Rescued

In downtown San Salvador, rescuers at the Ruben Dario Building pulled 17 people alive from the rubble. John Carroll, of Florida’s Dade-Metro fire and rescue team, said that workers were in contact with seven other people buried under the five fallen floors and that many more were believed to be inside.

“There are a lot of live ones,” he said. Other rescuers estimated that as many as 500 to 1,000 people may have been in the building when it fell.

“We’re working in the basement where we located some victims,” said Joaquin del Cueto. “We’re trying to break a hole through the first floor through a 30-foot tunnel. We tried jackhammers, but the foundation was weakening, so now we are using a hammer and chisel.”

Dogs brought in from the United States were used to inspect other sites for buried survivors.

The quake knocked out most of San Salvador’s telephone service Friday, but Duarte said at his news conference that 50% of local phone service and 15% of long-distance service had been restored.

Electric power, which was also knocked out, was restored to a few parts of the city by late Saturday. According to Communications Minister Rey Prendes, officials feared that restoring electric service too quickly might be dangerous because people might be electrocuted by downed power lines.

Most stores, restaurants and gas stations were closed. Long lines of people waited at the few gas pumps that were open for business. Radio stations reported that many people were searching for medicine because most pharmacies, their merchandise spilled onto the floor by the quake, were closed.

Airport Highway Closed

Officials closed the highway into the capital from El Salvador International Airport at Comalapa to all but emergency traffic. Scores of people could be seen walking into the capital. The highway was lined with fallen shanties and littered with boulders and dirt. One bridge was broken.

Residents of the destroyed shanties set up lean-tos and tents made out of blankets, plastics and corrugated sheet metal.

El Salvador’s violent politics intruded briefly into the disaster Saturday. Guerrillas fighting the government in the countryside said they were proclaiming a unilateral truce so that peace would prevail during rescue operations.

Duarte scoffed at the notion, saying that two minor guerrilla attacks had occurred in rural areas during the past 24 hours.

Rebuff to Rebels

“What we are doing is more important than anything these gentlemen say,” Duarte declared. “If they are killing and kidnaping people, they are not taking into account what is happening here.”

Defense Minister Carlos E. Vides Casanova indirectly admitted that the armed forces were slow to react to the disaster Friday.

“Communications were lost and personnel was scarce,” he said. He added that troops from the provinces are being transferred to San Salvador to aid in security and rescue work.

One Western diplomat offered a different explanation for the army’s slow response: “They are still fighting a war. When the earthquake first hit, they still felt a need to protect the country from guerrillas.”

Military helicopters normally used in the fighting against guerrillas could be seen hovering over rescue operations.

Several of the U.S. and Guatemalan rescue teams now here worked together during the Mexico City earthquake last year and said that this rescue operation is going much more smoothly.

Carroll of Florida said his team arrived early Saturday in a U.S. military C-130 aircraft.

“We didn’t have generators in Mexico City for three days,” Carroll said.

He said that the Salvadoran government has been cooperative and organized and that the teams now have experience working together.

“The bottom line is we’ve pulled a lot of people out of here alive and who cares why,” Carroll said.

Duarte decreed a state of “national calamity” on Friday, and he said Saturday that only two looting incidents had been reported.

In Washington, assistant Secretary of State Abrams praised the Duarte government.

“All indications are that President Duarte has the situation under control,” Abrams said.

Defense Minister Carlos Vides Casanova said he did not expect the disaster to lead to social unrest among this capital’s poor.

“One quality of the Salvadoran is that, if his house falls, he is thankful to be alive and ready to go to work,” Vides Casanova said as he and Duarte inspected the rescue work at the Ruben Dario Building.

“We have to be used to falling and getting up quickly,” the general added.