MEXICO CITY
(Reuters) - Most schools in Mexico City remained closed on Monday after last
week’s deadly earthquake, but children outside the capital were set to return
to their classrooms, although aftershocks were still jolting the country.
Search
operations in the Mexican capital were narrowed to a handful of buildings
destroyed by the 7.1 magnitude earthquake last Tuesday that killed at least 320
people.
The quake
rendered thousands of people homeless with many of them living in tents in the
streets or emergency shelters, but there were signs that the 20 million people
living the greater metropolitan area were gradually resuming their routines.
“Our
neighborhood is in mourning,” said Deborah Levy, 44, from trendy Condesa
district that was among the worst hit. “Some neighbors and friends got together
(Sunday). We went to eat to cheer ourselves up, looking for a little
normality.”
Some of the
most affected neighborhoods, those built on top of a soft ancient lake bed,
still had entire blocks cordoned off.
More than
44,000 schools in six states were due to reopen on Monday, but only 103 of them
in Mexico City, which suffered most of the fatalities.
Officials
said they did not want to impede relief efforts, so more than 4,000 public
schools and nearly as many private schools in the capital will remain closed
for now.
The National
Autonomous University of Mexico, with 350,000 students at campuses in and
around Mexico City, will resume classes on Monday.
Of 6,000
damaged buildings, some 1,500 have yet to be inspected, said Horacio Urbano,
president of Centro Urbano, a think tank specializing in urban issues and real
estate.
Ten percent
of the damaged buildings were constructed after 1990, by which time strict
building codes had been enacted in the wake of the 1985 earthquake that killed
some 10,000 people.
Mexican and
international rescue teams remove a painting as they search for survivors in a
collapsed building after an earthquake, at Roma neighborhood in Mexico City.
REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Search
operations, using advanced audio equipment to detect signs of life beneath
tonnes of rubble, continued at a few buildings with help from teams from as far
afield as Israel and Japan.
At a school
in southern Mexico City where 19 children and six adults had been reported
killed, officials recovered the body an adult woman on Sunday.
The search
for survivors continued in a ruined office building in the Roma neighborhood
and in a five-story apartment building in historic Tlalpan.
Authorities
called off efforts in the upper-middle class Lindavista zone after pulling 10
bodies from the rubble over several days, and work at the Tlalpan building was
briefly halted on Saturday by a magnitude 6.2 aftershock. [nL2N1M40AJ]
Another 5.7
aftershock struck on Sunday off the west coast, jolting southwestern Mexico,
and seismologists predicted more tremors to come.
[nL2N1M509H]
While aid
and volunteer workers have flooded into the accessible districts of Mexico
City, people in more remote neighborhoods and surrounding states have received
less attention.
[nL2N1M50BH]
Miguel Angel
Luna, a 40-year old architect, joined a caravan of civilians that headed out
late last week to help isolated communities scattered around the base of the
Popocatepetl volcano in the state of Morelos.
Around 40
percent of the adobe homes he saw in poor villages had been completely
destroyed and some 80 percent were heavily damaged, Luna said.
“We’re
talking about very poor communities,” Luna said. “They don’t have tools, they
don’t have materials, they don’t have money to rebuild.”
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