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Sunday, Nov. 08, 2009

Rescuers dig for survivors in buried Salvador town

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Soldiers and residents dug through rock and debris looking for dozens of people missing when a mudslide covered a town in El Salvador, part of a wave of flooding and landslides that has killed at least 124 people in this Central American country.

Days of heavy rains, indirectly linked to Hurricane Ida's passage through the region, caused mud and boulders to sweep down the side of the Chichontepec volcano before dawn Sunday, burying homes and cars in the town of Verapaz, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) outside the capital, San Salvador.

Homes, streets and cars were swallowed by the mud in the town of about 3,000 inhabitants.

"It was terrible. The rocks came down on top of the houses and split them in two, and split the pavement," said Manuel Melendez, 61, who whose home was destroyed. "I heard people screaming all around."

Amid a persistent drizzle, rescuers dug frantically for survivors late Sunday with shovels and even their bare hands. But the search was made difficult by collapsed walls, boulders and downed power lines that blocked heavy machinery.

President Mauricio Funes declared a national emergency and called the damages incalculable.

"The images that we have seen today are of a devastated country," Funes said on local television.

El Salvador's Civil Protection agency raised the death toll by to 124 late Sunday, with another 60 people missing. It didn't break down the deaths by location, but the deaths were concentrated in San Salvador and San Vicente province, where Verapaz is located. Red Cross spokesman Carlos Lopez Mendoza said earlier that 60 people were missing in Verapaz.

Matias Mendoza, 26, was at home in Verapaz with his wife Claudia and their year-old son, Franklin, when the earth began moving.

"It was about two in the morning when the rain started coming down harder, and the earth started shaking," Mendoza recalled. "I warned my wife and grabbed my son, and all of a sudden we heard a sound. The next thing I knew I was lying among parts of the walls of my house."

"A few minutes later, I found my wife and my son in the middle of the rubble, and, thank God, we're alive," said Mendoza, who suffered cuts on his cheek that emergency workers stitched up.

Almost 7,000 people saw their homes damaged by landslides or cut off by floodwaters following three days of downpours from a low-pressure system indirectly related to Hurricane Ida, which brushed Mexico's Cancun resort on Sunday before steaming into the Gulf of Mexico.

San Vicente Gov. Manuel Castellanos said workers were struggling to clear roadways and power and water service had been knocked out. At least 300 houses were flooded when a river in Verapaz overflowed its banks, Lopez Mendoza said.

Ida's presence in the western Caribbean may have played a role in drawing a Pacific low-pressure system toward El Salvador, causing the rains, said Dave Roberts, a Navy hurricane specialist at the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

He added, however, that "if there were deaths associated with this rainfall amount in El Salvador, I would not link it to Ida."