A Noise Like Thunder

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Les Connolly, 43, an account executive for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in Birmingham, Mich., was staying on the tenth floor of the Maria Isabel Sheraton. "The building swayed five or six feet each way. We were holding on to the walls as it went. It would go all the way one way and you'd think it was going over and you'd be dead. Then the next time it would sway all the way the other way and you'd think this time it would crash. Finally it righted itself, and we all ran out on the street." There Connolly saw "people without clothes, wrapped in towels, and crying. It was a horrible experience."

A visiting British couple, John Meeus and his wife, spoke of the quake with British understatement. They were staying at the Galeria Plaza Hotel in the Zona Rosa neighborhood, Mexico City's popular tourist area. "I was having a cup of coffee in bed when my hand and the cup started shaking," Meeus said. "I looked out of the window and saw a building collapse. I turned to my wife and said, 'I think we've got a slight earth tremor.' "

At the National Medical Center along Cuauhtemoc Avenue, eight of the nine buildings that are part of the complex were seriously damaged. Ambulances were waved away. Many already seriously ill patients had to be evacuated to other facilities, along with the newly injured.

Nurses gathered outside the remains of the seven-story gynecology-obstetrics wing of General Hospital. "There were 44 beds per floor and 44 cribs," sobbed one. "I had just walked out of there, off the night shift. My friends . . ." She could not continue. There were no known survivors among the 250 people, patients and staff who were thought to have been in the building when it collapsed.

At an adjacent dormitory for medical residents, the bodies of ten doctors were pulled from the debris. As rescue workers scrambled over the wreckage, carrying picks and ropes, one suddenly shouted, "Silence!" He had heard sounds of life. "We are here," said a muffled voice. The workers quickly lowered an oxygen hose into a tiny crevice to keep the survivors alive. On Avenida Juarez, a state technical school, with an enrollment of 300 teenage students, was leveled. Outside, a red-eyed teacher sat in the middle of the closed-off street typing a list of the missing.

Part of the city's largest public housing project, Tlatelolco, was reduced to what a local paper called "a collective tomb." With thousands of families living in about 40 buildings, the final death toll at Tlatelolco was still uncertain by week's end, but it was assumed to be high. All that was left of one of the project's high-rises, the 13-story Nuevo Leon, was a 100-ft.-high pile of concrete and reinforcing bars. With at least 40 occupants found dead and 230 counted as injured, officials feared that 1,500 remained trapped, alive or dead, in the ruins. Volunteers formed lines to pass chunks of concrete, hand to hand, down from the mountain of rubble in the effort to find survivors. When a young boy was pulled out of the crush of concrete --bloody and bruised, but not seriously hurt--rescuers and bystanders broke into cheers.