Most
schools in Mexico City remained closed yesterday after last week’s
deadly earthquake, but children outside the capital were set to return
to their classrooms even though aftershocks are still jolting the
country.
Search operations in Mexico City were narrowed to five
buildings destroyed last Tuesday by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that
killed at least 320 people, Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera told local
broadcaster Televisa yesterday.
“These are the places where rescue
efforts continue,” said Mancera, ticking off locations in central and
southern portions of the metropolis.
The quake rendered thousands of
people homeless, with many of them living in tents in the streets or
emergency shelters, but there were signs that the 20mn people who live
in Mexico City’s greater metropolitan area were gradually resuming their
routines.
“Our neighbourhood is in mourning,” said Deborah Levy, 44,
from the trendy Condesa district that was among the worst hit by the
quake. “Some neighbours and friends got together (Sunday). We went to
eat to cheer ourselves up, looking for a little normality.”
Some of the most affected neighbourhoods, those built on top of a soft ancient lake bed, still had entire blocks cordoned off.
More
than 44,000 schools in six states were due to reopen yesterday, but
only 103 in Mexico City, or barely 1% of its schools, were set to resume
classes after they were certified as structurally safe.
Officials
said they did not want to impede relief efforts, so more than 4,000
public schools and nearly as many private schools in the capital will
remain closed for now.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico,
with 350,000 students at campuses in and around Mexico City, resumed
classes yesterday.
Of 6,000 damaged buildings, some 1,500 have yet to
be inspected, said Horacio Urbano, president of Centro Urbano, a think
tank specialising in urban issues and real estate.
Search operations,
using advanced audio equipment to detect signs of life beneath tonnes
of rubble, continued at a few buildings with help from teams from as far
afield as Israel and Japan.
At a school in southern Mexico City
where 19 children and six adults had previously been reported killed,
officials recovered another body on Sunday, that of an adult woman.
The
search for survivors continued in a ruined office building in the Roma
neighbourhood and in a five-story apartment building in historic
Tlalpan.
Authorities called off efforts in the upper-middle class
Lindavista zone after pulling 10 bodies from the rubble over several
days, and work at the Tlalpan building was briefly halted on Saturday by
a magnitude 6.2 aftershock.
Another 5.7 aftershock struck on Sunday
off Mexico’s west coast, jolting the southwestern part of the country,
and seismologists predicted more tremors to come.
A flattened car is extracted from the rubble of a collapsed building in the Roma Norte neighbourhood in Mexico City.