Salvadoran President Francisco Flores Sunday asked for 3,000 coffins to be donated, as rescuers all but abandoned hope of finding further survivors amid the devastation wrought by a killer quake, reported AFP.
Late Sunday, officials said around 400 people had died in the tiny Central American country, but the death toll rose by the hour as more bodies were retrieved and hundreds of people are still missing, said the agency.
In addition, 1,177 people were reported injured, and 11,057 were forced to abandon their homes.
An entire section of hillside collapsed following Saturday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake, entombing hundreds of houses in a swath of destruction 100 yards wide and 500 yards long, reported the Washington Post newspaper.
International aid started pouring in, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan joined Flores in calling for a major international effort to ease the tragedy that had struck this impoverished nation, said the agency.
"We have asked the government of Colombia to donate 3,000 coffins, to put them at the disposal of people who cannot afford them," Flores said at a news conference.
Amid the grim devastation, the rescue of a lone survivor at one scene of rescue operations boosted the flagging spirits of exhausted emergency teams, who had retrieved one mangled body after another.
As the rescue operation was under way, said the agency, emergency teams managed to talk to Moreno, put him on a drip and give him oxygen.
Many residents were out of their homes when the quake hit, but many more were trapped inside their homes when the mountainside came crashing down, smashing or burying everything in its path.
Red Cross officials said more than 1,000 bodies remained buried under the landslide that covered and smashed about 300 houses, according to AFP.
In neighboring Guatemala, six people were killed by the earthquake that rocked all of Central America Saturday and measured between 7.6 and 7.9 on the open-ended Richter scale.
Throughout the day on Sunday, Spain, Turkey, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Colombia and Venezuela all pledged aid in the form of rescue teams, supplies and money to El Salvador, where authorities said 7,934 homes were entirely destroyed, and 16,890 more were damaged, said the Washington Post.
An earthquake that struck El Salvador in 1986 killed more than 1,500 people, said the paper -- Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
