Rescue Efforts Winding Down in Guadalajara

After three sleepless days of burrowing into the earth, Angelica Sanchez knew that her work was nearly done Saturday when her search dogs began to lose their sense of smell.

Sanchez was one of a team of specially trained rescue workers brought into the city to search for victims buried in the rubble left behind when a series of underground gas explosions devastated downtown Guadalajara neighborhoods last week, killing more than 200 people.

Called topos , moles, Sanchez and the rescue workers were no longer finding any survivors. “At this point, the best we can hope for is to recover the bodies,” she said. “But even that is getting harder, because at this point, even the dogs are tired.”

Elsewhere, Guadalajarans buried their dead and continued to ask how authorities could have allowed such a disaster to happen. For three days before Wednesday’s explosions in the municipal sewer system, residents had complained of a pungent smell of gas. Officials of both the city and Jalisco state were aware of a gas leak but did not order an evacuation.

Initial reports have pointed to both a gasoline storage facility and a cooking-oil factory as possible sources of the volatile gas that seeped into the sewers.

The head of the city sewer system and other city and state officials have said that the storage facility operated by Pemex, the government oil monopoly, was the source of the leak.

An underground gasoline pipeline crisscrosses the sewer line that exploded Wednesday.

The Associated Press reported that three state field investigators said Saturday that gasoline leaking from a Pemex pipeline caused the explosion. They said the gasoline flowed along a sewer line that crosses the pipeline and entered the sewer system in the Reforma neighborhood where the blast occurred. The inspectors declined to be identified by name, the AP said.

On Saturday, city and state officials filed nervously in and out of the local offices of the Mexican attorney general, who is heading an investigation into the cause of the disaster and the actions of authorities in the days before the blasts.

At a packed morning news conference, Atty. Gen. Ignacio Morales Lechuga said the inquiry is nearly complete, adding that those responsible face possible criminal prosecution for homicide.

About 200 officials have been interviewed, Morales said. He declined to make further comment. His report is due to be made public today.

News that those responsible may soon be punished was of little consolation to those on downtown Gante Street, where dozens of homes and businesses were leveled in the blasts. With only a handful of people still missing, bulldozers and other heavy equipment were used to help clear the debris.

Maria Luisa Garcia, 28, pleaded with Sanchez and other rescue workers not to give up looking for her 18-year-old cousin. The missing man had been crossing the street when the sewer exploded and the ground opened beneath him.

“We’ve been everywhere looking for him,” Garcia said. “The hospitals, the morgue--there’s no other place to look.” Pointing to a mountain of crushed bricks and twisted metal, she said: “He has to be here.”

Sanchez promised to keep looking, but she held out little hope. A 30-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman, she has worked as a volunteer mole since the 1985 Mexico City earthquake.

In three days of work in Guadalajara, she and her team of moles had found 14 people. Only three were alive--and those were found Wednesday, the day of the explosions.

“We’ll stay here and keep looking until the end,” she said. “The people want us to stay a little longer.”