Salvador Toll Rises to 890, Duarte Says; 10,000 Hurt

President Jose Napoleon Duarte told his nation Sunday that the death toll from Friday’s powerful earthquake has reached 890, after a day in which rescue teams continued to pull survivors from the mangled ruins of several downtown office buildings.

“There are still many more, especially in collapsed buildings and places we have been unable to reach,” Duarte said in a nationally televised news conference.

Among those confirmed dead were two Americans. Rescuers used dogs and ultrasound equipment in a seemingly futile search for a third American, businessman Harry Jacobson, 71, of Racine, Wis., who was buried in the first floor of the former Gran Hotel El Salvador.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Jacob Gillespie identified the two known American dead as Jose Mauricio Juarez, in his late 30s, and Yolanda Stets, 12. Juarez, who held dual U.S.-Salvadoran citizenship, was crushed in the collapse of the Ruben Dario building, and Stets, who lived with her mother here, died in a restaurant collapse, Gillespie said.

In his broadcast, Duarte said that the 890 dead have been counted and buried.

“We have had up to 10,000 injured and possibly 200,000 left without housing,” he added.

Duarte issued an urgent international appeal for medicine.

“In El Salvador, I can tell you that we are practically without medicine. We are calling on friendly nations to help us in this respect,” he said.

20 Planeloads of Supplies

Earlier, Red Cross officials said the crisis caused by the earthquake, which registered 5.4 on the Richter scale, was “stabilizing,” as badly needed medicine, food and temporary shelters arrived from the United States, Europe and Latin America. Duarte said that 20 planeloads of relief supplies have arrived since Friday.

Some of the injured who earlier had been too frightened to leave their shattered neighborhoods began to arrive at medical centers to seek treatment for their wounds.

Much of the capital’s telephone service was restored, and the capital’s better-off neighborhoods were receiving water and electricity once again, but most poor and heavily damaged areas remained without services.

A hard rain began to fall late Sunday over residents left homeless when their wood, adobe brick or cement houses collapsed. Spokesman Ernesto Ferreiro of the Salvadoran Red Cross said that as many as 60% of San Salvador’s nearly 1 million residents may be sleeping outdoors “out of fear,” many of them without cover.

Frequent strong tremors continued to shake the capital.

Poor and overcrowded residential neighborhoods were among the areas hardest hit by the earthquake. Ferreiro said that nine neighborhoods, including San Jacinto, La Vega, Santa Anita and Planes de Renderos, were 50% destroyed.

Health Hazards Told

Residents of the so-called marginal neighborhoods are camped out of doors. In the resulting unsanitary conditions, health workers said, there has been a rise in the cases of diarrhea among children.

Some residents complained that they have not received help from the Duarte government.

“We have nothing but God above,” said Victoria Vasquez Sibrian, 32, from the Communidad Modelo neighborhood on the highway to El Salvador International Airport. “They have done nothing for us.”

Many jobs also were lost in wrecked buildings that housed such small businesses as shoe and television repair shops, corner stores, bakeries and tortilla factories.

Chronic Housing Shortage

Even before Friday’s earthquake, the capital was short of housing and bulging with migrants fleeing the countryside where leftist guerrillas are fighting the government in a 6 1/2-year-old uprising. The city’s steep ravines are lined with shanties of corrugated sheet metal, and the unemployment rate runs about 50%.

“Given the economic and social situation in the country, this catastrophe should not be measured in cadavers,” Juan Maldonado, a spokesman for the National Assn. of Private Enterprise, said. “Economically speaking, the problems may be (proportionally) larger than in Mexico.”

An earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale hit Mexico City on Sept. 19, 1985, and it and a second major tremor left as many as 10,000 people dead and more than 100,000 homeless. More than 22,700 people died in neighboring Guatemala when a 7.5 earthquake struck in 1976, and a 6.2 temblor all but destroyed Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, in December, 1972, killing about 6,000 people.

To avoid opportunities for corruption or charges of government mismanagement, Duarte put the business community in charge of distributing international aid.

Medical Supplies Needed

Maldonado said that relief workers still need more lamps, portable oxygen tanks and basic medical supplies such as alcohol, aspirin and antiseptics. He said the homeless need food, clothing and shelter.

Gen. John R. Galvin, head of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, toured the damaged areas for two hours and said the United States had sent six C-130 transport airplanes full of relief supplies.

The United States provides about $500 million a year in assistance to El Salvador, about a third of that in military aid to fight the guerrilla war, and maintains at least 55 military advisers here permanently.

Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas of San Salvador said he has set up a Roman Catholic Church commission to coordinate aid from religious bodies.

Rivera delivered his Sunday homily and Mass outdoors in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral to show solidarity with the homeless. Behind him, the Duenas Building, a commercial edifice, leaned precariously on its collapsed first floor.

Pope’s Message

Rivera delivered a message of “concern and love” from Pope John Paul II and urged the warring forces to stop fighting and show their support for the victims of the earthquake. More than 50,000 people are estimated to have died in the internal war.

A spokesman for the guerrillas said in Mexico City on Saturday that they would observe a unilateral cease-fire, but Duarte rejected the gesture as a propaganda ploy, citing incidents of fighting after the quake.

Dozens of buildings surrounding the cathedral in downtown San Salvador collapsed or were seriously damaged and will have to be torn down, Salvadoran officials said. Several factories also were damaged, but business leaders said they do not have an estimate of the total cost of the damage.

Gen. Adolofo Blandon, head of the joint chiefs of staff, offered an off-the-cuff estimate of $400 million after surveying the hardest-hit areas, but official figures were not available.

Cheers for Rescuer

Rescue teams around the Ruben Dario building cheered one of their dust-covered colleagues after he brought a critically injured woman from a tunnel dug through the rubble of the former five-story building. The woman was the second victim rescued alive Sunday and the 28th pulled from the debris of that commercial and office building in the last two days.

Later, according to U.S. Embassy spokesman Gillespie, a 6-year-old girl emerged from the rubble.

Gillespie said that since Friday, 52 people have been freed from the wreckage of the Ruben Dario building and that rescuers know from voice contact that three others are alive.

John Carroll, of Miami’s Metro-Dade Rescue Team, said workers would continue digging through the night to explore crawl spaces between slabs of concrete.

Six blocks away, at the building, now a commercial center, that used to be the Gran Hotel El Salvador, French and Swiss rescuers searched for Jacobson, the structure’s owner, as his son, Peder, stood watch.

“Until you know, you always hope,” Peder Jacobson said.

Gino Luzi, a business associate of Jacobson’s, said that dogs searched the site throughout the day for signs of life.

Day of Sadness

“They wag their tails when they find someone alive and are sad when they find a body. They were sad all day,” Luzi said.

The excavation area reeked of decaying bodies.

Jose Morales Chavez, a Red Cross coordinator, said that three women were rescued from the wreckage of an annex of the presidential palace on the city’s southern outskirts.

Other officials said rescue workers have managed to pull 22 people alive from the Planning Ministry, along with the bodies of five who died there. Five others are believed to be still trapped inside.

Swiss, Japanese, Guatemalan and Mexican rescue teams were working with the Salvadorans, Americans and French at seven sites.

Local hospitals were overcrowded Sunday, and many patients were being sheltered outside in tents. The Red Cross recorded about 4,700 major and minor operations performed on quake victims.

Doctors said that they also were seeing many cases of “psychosis”--headaches and nervous disorders and requests for tranquilizers--the result of the fear and shock of the earthquake.

Officials said that looting has been kept to a minimum, although Red Cross spokesman Ferreiro said that people who were apparently would-be burglars started a panic in the San Jacinto neighborhood late Saturday by spreading a rumor that a nearby volcano was about to erupt.