Mexico City schools still closed

Mostschools in Mexico City remained closed yesterday after last week’sdeadly earthquake, but children outside the capital were set to returnto their classrooms even though aftershocks are still jolting thecountry.Search operations in Mexico City were narrowed to fivebuildings destroyed last Tuesday by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake thatkilled at least 320 people, Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera told localbroadcaster Televisa yesterday.“These are the places where rescueefforts continue,” said Mancera, ticking off locations in central andsouthern portions of the metropolis.The quake rendered thousands ofpeople homeless, with many of them living in tents in the streets oremergency shelters, but there were signs that the 20mn people who livein Mexico City’s greater metropolitan area were gradually resuming theirroutines.“Our neighbourhood is in mourning,” said Deborah Levy, 44,from the trendy Condesa district that was among the worst hit by thequake. “Some neighbours and friends got together (Sunday). We went toeat 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.Morethan 44,000 schools in six states were due to reopen yesterday, butonly 103 in Mexico City, or barely 1% of its schools, were set to resumeclasses after they were certified as structurally safe.Officialssaid they did not want to impede relief efforts, so more than 4,000public schools and nearly as many private schools in the capital willremain closed for now.The National Autonomous University of Mexico,with 350,000 students at campuses in and around Mexico City, resumedclasses yesterday.Of 6,000 damaged buildings, some 1,500 have yet tobe inspected, said Horacio Urbano, president of Centro Urbano, a thinktank specialising in urban issues and real estate.Search operations,using advanced audio equipment to detect signs of life beneath tonnesof rubble, continued at a few buildings with help from teams from as farafield as Israel and Japan.At a school in southern Mexico Citywhere 19 children and six adults had previously been reported killed,officials recovered another body on Sunday, that of an adult woman.Thesearch for survivors continued in a ruined office building in the Romaneighbourhood and in a five-story apartment building in historicTlalpan.Authorities called off efforts in the upper-middle classLindavista zone after pulling 10 bodies from the rubble over severaldays, and work at the Tlalpan building was briefly halted on Saturday bya magnitude 6.2 aftershock.Another 5.7 aftershock struck on Sundayoff Mexico’s west coast, jolting the southwestern part of the country,and seismologists predicted more tremors to come.