 |
|
Dear Friends and family,
Thanks to those of you who have called, sent email messages, and prayed for us here in battered El Salvador. Carter and I and our friend Brian (who had the bad luck to be visiting this week!) are all together and fine after yesterday's 7.6 scale earthquake that went from Costa Rica to Mexico. Apparently, most of the damage (and the epicenter of the earthquake) are here in El Salvador. I am writing to you in our garage with my bicycle helmet on! We did not write sooner, as there have been aftershocks every 2 or 3 hours that have kept us jumping and afraid that the computers might be damaged if we had them out long enough to write. Things seemed to have calmed down a lot for now. Our house was not damaged, just shaken badly. We slept in our tent last night in the yard, as it is unsafe to be inside for a long period of time. We are now "camping out" in the garage with valuables and some clothes and food packed in the car outside in case we have to abandon the house. We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood with very solid houses and just four hours after the earthquake our power and water service were restored. We never lost our telephone. Much of the country is without power, water and telephones. Hospitals have had to evacuate patients to the parking lots and streets and are in need of large-scale generators to keep things going until they get the power restored.
Many people were separated from family members at the time of the earthquake. One of our Salvadorean friends and his wife, were separated from their two daughters who were visiting relatives in another town. Roads to certain areas are blocked by mudslides, and neither they nor the relatives who had the girls could get through. Hundreds of houses have collapsed in a lot of different towns, in a lot of different parts of the country. Here near San Salvador, one of close in "suburbs"called Santa Tecla (or New San Salvador) had a huge mud slide in one of the housing developments. Hundreds of houses were buried and around a hundred people died. I just stopped writing this again and shut the computer down as another tremor came. It is rather nerve-wracking. I will have to be brief.
Mudslides seem to be the biggest problem - they've occurred in several different parts of the country. Some have blocked highways; others have buried houses. There have been injuries and deaths from walls and parts of buildings falling on people or on buses with people in them (no exact figures yet as the country is in crisis, but they are talking hundreds at this point, not thousands). People are responding in an incredible way - going out to the affected areas with supplies and shovels to help supply people or dig them out. The government is responding by sending out inspectors to the injured areas, doing inventories, sending out helicopters, etc. and they are making requests for assistance to various near-by governments and to the U.S. We heard that the U.S. army is sending in helicopters and excavation experts. So is Mexico. Maybe the military here will do something useful for the people for a change.
Some people lost their houses and everything they had. We will write more later when we can. We are in direct contact with my parents and with Carter's two brothers, so just figure that no news is good news and pray for the people who were affected.
Thanks and love,
Marty Collier
URL: http://gbgm-umc.org/news/2001/jan/elsalvadorbm.stm