To visitors expecting the worst, it is surprising how well most of the country survived the 7.6-magnitude quake. The majority of buildings–from clapboard and tin market stalls to brick-and-mortar homes–remain standing. And most of the nearly 700 confirmed fatalities came not from the earthquake itself, but from the landslides it set off. In dozens of places, walls fell only when trees and mud catapulted through neighborhoods nestled under mountainsides.
But as the search continues for the 2,000 still reported missing, residents are starting to ask whether better planning could have kept the death toll down. That’s a question raised more often in the aftermath of any natural disaster. Earthquakes, floods, landslides, droughts and forest-fires are becoming more damaging not because they are any more intense, but because more people are in their path.
Nowhere is that trend more evident than in Central and South America, where population pressure is forcing more people into sub-standard housing on precarious terrain. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch killed thousands in Nicaragua and Honduras when rain-soaked slopes which had been stripped of their trees eventually gave way. The same thing happened in Venezuela last year.
In El Salvador, too, survivors are starting to blame developers and the government for their plight. The single biggest concentration of deaths occurred in La Colina, a middle-class neighborhood of several hundred homes built in the mid-1980s in the suburb of Santa Tecla, 10 miles outside of San Salvador. During the past few years, developers built a half-dozen upscale houses at the base of a slope, just above the older neighborhood. The upper part of the slope, meanwhile, remained thickly forested.
When the mountainside collapsed a few seconds after the earth began to shake, it swallowed several blocks and spat them back out as pieces of concrete, mattresses, baby-doll legs and garbage-can lids. Nearly 300 of the 681 bodies recovered nationwide have come from the rubble in Santa Tecla, and a few hundred more people are still missing there. “I’m alone without my two children,” says Sylvia Cea, standing near the spot where her house had been. “My son always told me, ‘Mama, don’t worry. When I grow up I’ll take care of you.’” Her children, Carlos,16, and Janci, 12, had been warned often to go to the garage in the event of an earthquake. That’s where rescue teams dug up their bodies.
Carlos, the family patriarch, has worked in Los Angeles for the past decade and wired money home every month. This week, he returned to bury his children and salvage what reamains of the family belongings. Meanwhile, near the Cea home, an army colonel stood alongside rescuers, wondering if the body they were digging up could be his missing son. It was a scene repeated throughout the eighborhood. Backhoes and dump trucks sifted through the dirt; soldiers, police and relatives of the dead moved in with shovels and their hands when somebody saw flesh.
By Wednesday, rescue teams had all but given up hope of finding anybody else alive. Meanwhile, homes just a few feet from the devastation stood unscathed, silent witnesses to the ongoing debate over whether the dead were victims of bad luck–or bad planning.
