American Notes DISASTER

In bone-dry Brownsville, Texas, the rain came fast and furious, sending pedestrians scurrying for protection. Dozens took shelter at La Tienda Amigo, a retail mart near the bridge to Matamoros, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. Downpour turned to deluge, dumping two inches of rain in 30 minutes -- apparently enough to collapse the structure housing the store into a murderous heap of concrete and metal. Dozens of people were crushed or trapped in the rubble. One wall tumbled outward, killing a woman sitting in a car parked in front of the store. Anthony Padilla, a photographer for the Brownsville Herald, witnessed the scene from across the street. "The entire storefront, the windows just exploded out," he said. "People just covered their heads, kind of ducked down, and in the next instant the whole thing came down. People I had been looking at were covered with rubble."

As relatives and friends waited anxiously, rescuers with a crane, tractors and bare hands toiled through Thursday night, using dogs and sensitive microphones to locate buried survivors. By the weekend it appeared that about 25 people had been in the store at the time of the cave-in. The toll, including passersby: 14 dead, 47 injured.