In Grim Wake of Mexican Quake, Death Toll at 48

As hope faded and the death toll rose Tuesday at an eight-story resort hotel that became a mass grave in an instant, Jim and Joanne Proffitt nursed their wounds and reflected on the moment when they nearly joined at least 21 fellow guests and employees in death.

The Austin, Tex., couple were on their honeymoon in this Pacific Coast resort, having breakfast in the Costa Real hotel garden, when the 7.6 earthquake hit Monday morning, killing at least 48.

Joanne, 52, thought it was the surf at first. Then the ground shuddered and fell away. Jim, 51, grabbed her hand. They ran for the glass wall around the hotel’s perimeter. “I was riding that wall like a bull”--until her husband pulled her over it, Joanne said.

They ran 30 feet on undulating ground before the explosion: eight floors of plasterboard, concrete and luxury rooms caving in, crushing guests, waiters and maids in a second and sucking the glass out of the perimeter wall in an implosion that tore up the Proffitts’ legs and threw them to the ground.

“There was so much dust, I couldn’t see six inches in front of me,” Jim Proffitt recalled over a beer the morning after. “When the dust settled, I turned around and there was no hotel. No nothing.”

The Proffitts’ escape from Mexico’s most powerful earthquake in a decade was among the few positive notes on a grim day of accounting.

As rescue workers armed with cranes, sledgehammers and shovels continued to tear through the flattened remains of the Costa Real, federal officials confirmed that Monday’s quake killed at least 48 people in the coastal states of Colima and Jalisco.

For most of the survivors--among them scores of tourists who spent a night filled with aftershocks sleeping poolside rather than in their five-star hotel rooms--the morning after was a time for departure, with most traveling to Guadalajara and flights home.

At the same time, Mexico and its tourism industry were bracing for another natural disaster as the 115-m.p.h. winds of Hurricane Roxanne approached the Yucatan Peninsula. Officials said thousands of tourists were evacuated from luxury hotels in Cancun and Cozumel, and the government shut down the region’s 25 seaports in advance of the storm, which forecasters were saying could hit land as early as Tuesday night.

It was the aftermath of Monday’s earthquake, though, that drew most of the government’s resources throughout the day.

With helicopters saturating the sky above, Mexican army and civil defense crews were hard at work in Colima and Jalisco repairing bridges, buildings, homes and streets that split literally in half. Medicine, food and water were rushed to emergency centers set up for hundreds of homeless. And Mexico’s defense minister, Enrique Cervantes, warned that the death toll could climb.

With 21 bodies recovered by Tuesday afternoon--and more than 30 guests and staff still missing--the Costa Real hotel emerged as the quake’s single worst killing ground.

Late Tuesday, rescue workers were holding out hope for survivors. Civil defense official Miguel Silva Medina said rescue workers had discovered large holes in the wreckage when they reached the level that was once the lobby.

“We hope the people are in those holes,” he said, estimating that it will take two to three days to complete the excavation. “We’re not going to rest until we finish. We still have hope.”

As Jorge Reyes watched the army, police and civil defense crews hard at work in the rubble of the hotel, he spoke for many who were not as lucky as the Proffitts.

Like the Texas couple and many others at this seaside resort, Reyes’ 26-year-old sister, Angelica, was on her honeymoon when the quake flattened the hotel. Reyes rushed to the scene from the family’s home in Guadalajara, and he kept an all-night vigil by a hotel swimming pool filled with debris.

“Yesterday we had hope. This morning I gave up,” Reyes said wearily, as workmen carried two more bodies to a nearby 18-wheel refrigerated truck serving as a temporary morgue. “Now we just want to find their bodies. There are no survivors.”

The anguish was mixed with anger for many at the scene. Hotel workers, a local newspaper and many Manzanillo residents said the hotel--one of two large structures in town to collapse--was badly damaged in the powerful 1985 quake that killed thousands in Mexico City and damaged buildings throughout central Mexico. It was closed for four years before reopening in 1989, the local newspaper reported. But its owners, the paper said, never repaired the structural damage.

“We were all calling it dead,” said one hotel employee who asked not to be named. “They were going to demolish it. But then, with a little money, they remodeled it and reopened.”

The hotel’s manager, Alfonso Ramirez, denied the charge, insisting the building was safe. But Jim Proffitt said he tended to agree with the townspeople.

“It seemed awfully flimsy,” Proffitt, a surveyor and landscape architect, said of his honeymoon retreat. “Nothing goes down that quick and that low. I’m not qualified to pass judgment, but that building was what we call eyewash--all form and no substance.”

But he said it was difficult to feel much anger on Tuesday. The reason was not just his narrow brush with death. It was what happened after the collapse, he said.

When the Proffitts managed to get up, badly cut and bleeding, their breakfast waiter--a young man who had just lost his entire family in the hotel--choked back his grief and helped the couple to a local hospital. There, they said, they got the best of care.

Outside the hospital, they flagged a taxi. When the driver heard of their ordeal, he took them to a small hotel owned by a relative where they could spend the night.

“We insisted on staying in the lobby, and we only slept three hours, of course--ready to run any second,” Proffitt recalled.

“But they wouldn’t let us pay a cent for anything,” his wife said of the owners of the Hotel Star. “I insisted, and they just refused.”

The couple were still limping Tuesday, their clothes bloodstained, as they waited for a bus to Guadalajara, then a flight home.

But they said that, on balance, they remain undeterred in their retirement plans. “We came down here partly because we’re thinking about retiring in Mexico,” Jim said. And Joanne added that they still plan on it--”just not in Manzanillo.”

Times staff writer Fineman reported from Mexico City, and Mexico City Bureau researcher Darlington from Manzanillo.

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INFORMATION:

To obtain information about family and friends in Mexico, call the American Red Cross at (213) 739-4543 or the Consulate General of Mexico at (213) 351-6800. . . . The Los Angeles Chapter of the American Red Cross is accepting donations for earthquake victims at P.O. Box 57930, Los Angeles 90057. Pledges also can be made by contacting the Red Cross at (213) 739-5200.