Sifting Through Quake Ruins

El Asnam buries its dead

"The hospital walls suddenly split open in front of me. I saw the hole and I jumped through it."

Abdelkader Mayouf, 24, a medical technician in the Algerian town of El Asnam, recalled his escape as he gazed upon the ruins of the modern, four-story hospital where he had worked. Mayouf had been luckier than the 300 patients who were trapped in their beds when the earthquake struck.

Rescue teams continued to search for other possible survivors in the tangled debris of El Asnam last week, but with dwindling chances of finding life. Instead, with increasing frequency, they found more bodies. The killer quake, which created an initial shock of 7.5 on the Richter scale and a rapid succession of 20 other tremors, left fully 80% of the town destroyed. The initial estimate of 25,000 deaths was later reduced by more than half. Still, with the toll already at 6,000, the El Asnam quake was far worse than the previous one that had destroyed the city in 1954.

Many bodies of victims were wrapped in white sheets for burial in hillside cemeteries; others were hastily placed in communal graves. The 80,000 homeless were sheltered in makeshift camps, 30 to a tent, at locations on the outskirts of El Asnam. The quake also opened up 12-ft.-wide fissures in the countryside as much as 30 miles away, destroying scores of villages and leaving an estimated 325,000 rural inhabitants destitute.

The tragedy was compounded by the chaos of the first rescue efforts. "People were fighting for a chance to dig out the survivors," said a Danish journalist. As more help arrived from 30 countries, bringing some $1.5 million worth of aid and equipment, rescuers were often at cross-purposes. Swiss and French avalanche dogs, trained to sniff out buried bodies, were thrown off the scent by powerful disinfectants that were sprayed on buildings to keep decaying bodies from spreading disease. French microphonic devices, flown in to monitor buildings for faint sounds of breathing, were useless in the din of bulldozers.

Work crews, firemen and army disaster specialists nonetheless managed to rescue many of the living. On Wednesday, five days after the quake, a ten-month-old baby girl was found hungry but unhurt. Unlike so many children wandering the streets, she was reunited with older sisters and brothers. By then, with water in short supply, sanitation hazards were increasing, and Algerian officials had begun worrying not only about epidemics but about civil disorder. One convoy was raided by villagers, angry that truckloads of food and medicine were constantly passing them by. Armed soldiers were forced to mount patrols to guard against mass looting of tottering buildings.

The Algerian government plans to expand the tent city to house the crowded survivors for three or four months until prefabricated housing can be erected. Meanwhile, the city itself is to be sealed off and leveled to the ground. Surviving residents surveyed their demolished homes and wondered if the fertile Cheliff River valley town was even worth rebuilding. Said one young man:"I had heard people talk about the 1954 earthquake. But I could never imagine this. I think we should find another place."

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