A Noise Like Thunder

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(6 of 8)

The pall of smoke emanating from quake-caused fires first darkened the morning sky, then dissipated. By early afternoon an eerie silence, broken only by the wailing sirens of emergency vehicles, had settled over the normally boisterous city. The sun again broke through, casting a pink glow on crumbled buildings, piles of debris, windowless facades. Outside the remaining half of an apartment building on Calle Atenas, a man in a beige suit sat motionless, as though any shift of his body might dislodge more of the structure. "Please get my daughter, please get la chiquita," he whispered to the rescuers. The girl was in the ruins. "Where is your wife?" someone asked. "Oh, she already died," he replied.

Around a corner, several blocks of a street seemed untouched. Nonetheless, a young man looked worriedly above him: a 20-story building was leaning forward at an alarming angle. Farther down the street, another building was tilted backward, while a third had a V-shaped bulge in its middle. No pedestrian could feel safe below the damaged structures, yet three shabbily dressed women sat nearby, sipping coffee out of plastic cups. They said they were afraid to go back into their homes since the walls might tumble around them.

As workers scraped at the wreckage of one building with shovels, picks and even their bare hands, a middle-aged man in a worn leather jacket watched anxiously. Two of his daughters had died in his home's collapse. A rescuer , waved his hand for quiet: a dog was barking in the rubble. One of the workers reached into the debris and pulled out a white pup, trembling and whining. "Senor," said the worker, handing the animal to the grieving man. It was his dog. He cuddled it, trying to ease his own sorrow in comforting the pup.

Outside the capital, the destruction appeared to be sporadic and scattered. In Acapulco, the flashy Pacific resort town, the tropical sun had just begun to burn through the coastal clouds when the high-rise hotels that line the city's main avenue began to sway. Panicked tourists, many in nightgowns and robes, rushed into hotel lobbies. "I swear to God I thought my room was going to split in half," said one visitor from Dallas at the Hyatt Regency Excelaris. Hotel Worker Heriverto Flores was at home eating breakfast with his wife. "Tremors are nothing new to us," he said. "But this one was so hard we ran outside because we thought the house would come down."

At the Acapulco Princess Hotel, Christina Acosta of Miami Beach was celebrating her 24th birthday when she saw the wall of her room "just crack straight down from the ceiling to the floor. The noise was terrible. It was the longest minute and a half of my life. I thought, 'This is it; I made it to 24 and now it's all over.' " When the rocking stopped, the damage was surprisingly small, even though Acapulco was only 150 miles from the epicenter. The radar at the city's airport was knocked out, stranding travelers for a time, and there was no telephone service.