Survivor pulled from earthquake rubble

Press, 17 October 1986, Page 6

Survivor pulled from earthquake rubble

NZPA euter San Salvador International rescue workers yesterday found another survivor from San Salvador’s earthquake buried under a collapsed building on the outskirts of the city. The head of the British rescue team William MacMartin said they located the survivor with ultrasonic equipment after someone reported hearing voices in the building. A team of Guatemalan firemen dug him out shortly afterwards, but a second person with him was dead. The find came as foreign rescue experts from more than a dozen nations were beginning to think of abandoning the search for more survivors of the quake, which claimed more than 1000 lives.

A fireman with the French relief team, said his men were planning to return home today and a fireman from Florida said he expected his team to leave at the weekend. The United State Secretary of State, George Shultz, arrived in El Salvador yesterday to survey damage. Mr Shultz will tour San Salvador and discuss emergency aid with President Jose Napoleon Duarte, who has directed relief efforts to concentrate on those left destitute by the earthquake. Lack of adequate shelter for up to 200,000 homeless — a fifth of San Salvador’s population — has become the main problem, and shortages of food and medicine are serious. Landslides posed a new danger, with heavy rain

and fresh tremors sending hillsides sliding. Meanwhile, the military, which said Leftist guerrillas never held to their offer of a truce after the quake, reported that guerrillas killed two soldiers when they ambushed a patrol in Santa Rosa, near the Honduran border. A military communique also said the guerrillas blacked out parts of the east of the country when they blew up five electric pylons. But the guerrillas’ clandestine radio station, said yesterday that they were continuing to respect the truce. It accused Government forces of staging military sweeps in the south-east of El Salvador, and reported a helicopter rocket and machinegun attack on two hamlets in the’middle of the country.