Entombed boy still alive

Press, 5 October 1985, Page 10

Entombed boy still alive

• i ■ ; ■ 'a ' ' NZPA-Reuter Mexico City Rescuers trying to reach a nine-year-old boy trapped for two weeks under tonnes of rubble from Mexico’s killer quake say that he is again responding to e their signals. “He is responding, he is alive,” said Adolfo Sanchez, one of the men leading the rescue. ;1, s. The boy, discovered on Thursday, had earlier stopped answering rescuers’ questions — one tap for yes, two for no — sparking fears that he might be unconscious. Mr Sanchez said that rescuers, burrowing through four tunnels, were within

two metres of Luis Ramon Nafarrate. Rescuers said that there was no way of knowing how long it would take to complete the delicate task. Luis has survived against all odds, apparently because he has access to water from a burst main, long after most foreign rescue teams had abandoned all hope of finding survivors in the more than 400 buildings crushed by the earthquake. The over-all death toll is now estimated at more than 7000 and the number of buildings damaged or razed by the quake exceeds 3500. One of the men digging towards the boy said that the rescuers had dug a

“box” of four tunnels around him and were hoping to reach him through one of them. Although the technical details were not entirely clear at the site, attempts to reach Luis from above were apparently .thwarted. by a huge concrete slab leaning at an angle over the space where he has lived for the last two weeks. Tunnelling was temporarily halted several times through the day when the rescuers used sonar equipment and sensitive microphones to listen to signs of “Silence, please, everybody silence,” an official, his face covered by dust,

would shout Scores of journalists, ambulance drivers, Red Cross men and police in front of the two-storey nineteenth-century house would promptly heed the command; allowing an eerie quiet to settle over an area just two blocks from the most bustling square in the city of 18 million. X, Luis was the first person found alive in a wrecked building since Sunday, when two babies were pulled from the rubble of a' hospital. ’ Although Luis has been responding to shouts and questionsby the rescuers — one tap for yes, two for no — rescuers said that he had not spoken to them., *