Ecuadorean Pulled From Rubble Won't Need Coffin His Wife Bought

Bogota firefighters rescued alive Pablo Cordova from the Gato de Portoviejo Hotel rubble in Portoviejo Cuenca Image source: Gisella Bayona ‏@gisella_bayona

Despite the grief roiling this earthquake-stricken town, Pablo Cordova has something to be thankful for: He can return the coffin his wife had obtained for his funeral.

Pablo Cordova shakes hands with one of the Colombian firefighters who rescued him, at the Verdi Cevallos Balda hospital in Portoviejo, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. IMAGE: AP Photo/Emilio D. Garcia

Mashable report continues:

The 51-year-old hotel administrator was one of a trickle of survivors pulled from the rubble after Ecuador's strongest earthquake in decades flattened towns along the coast and killed at least 480 people.

Cordova's wife had given up on ever seeing him again after the five-story Gato de Portoviejo hotel collapsed on him Saturday night, pancaked by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake like the rest of downtown. She asked his boss to buy his casket.

But Cordova held out for 36 hours beneath the rubble, drinking his own urine and praying service would be restored before his cellphone battery died. He was finally able to call his wife on Monday afternoon, and was pulled from the wreckage soon after by a team of rescuers from Colombia.

"They were organizing the funeral, but I've been reborn."

"They were organizing the funeral, but I've been reborn," Cordova said, grinning from beneath his bushy mustache in a provincial hospital. "I will have to give that coffin back because I still have a long way to go before I die."

On Tuesday, teams from all over the world fanned out across the country's Pacific coastline to look for the dozens of people still missing. Residents joined in with their bare hands, increasingly desperate as the clock for finding survivors runs down.

"Since Saturday, when this country started shaking, I've slept only two hours and haven't stopped working," said Juan Carranza, one of the firefighters leading the rescue effort in Portoviejo.

In the port city of Manta, a group of about 50 rescuers working with trained dogs, hydraulic jacks and a drill managed to free eight people trapped for more than 32 hours in the rubble of a shopping center that was flattened by Saturday night's quake.

While the country cheered videos of such rescues, tragedy continued to mount.

At the same shopping center, authorities were working to free a woman they had found buried alive with a heavy concrete slab pinning her legs when an aftershock forced them to suspend the effort. When they returned the debris pile had moved and the woman was dead, said Angel Moreira, a firefighter coordinating the effort.

The official death toll was raised to 480 in the afternoon, but there was confusion about the number of missing.

After announcing the new figure for deaths, Deputy Interior Minister Diego Fuentes said 2,000 people had been reported as missing to a government registry created to track casualties. But it was not clear if all of those people remain unaccounted for. Earlier Tuesday, Ecuador's Defense Ministry said 231 people were missing.

Whichever number was correct, it raised the likelihood that more dead would be found and the toll could surpass casualties from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade. Among the dead were at least nine foreigners, including an American and two Canadians.

A nun from Northern Ireland also died. Her Roman Catholic religious order, Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother, said Sister Clare Theresa Crockett was leading a group of trainee nuns to safety at a school where she worked when a stairwell collapsed. She and five of the young postulants died.

Complicating rescue efforts is the lack of electricity in many areas, meaning noisy power generators must be used, making it harder to hear anyone who might be trapped beneath rubble.

Christian Rivera, the head of emergency services for the capital, Quito, said that depending on the circumstances a person without serious injuries can survive up to a week in such conditions.

"After that, there's a quick decline ... and the rescuers' work becomes very difficult," he said.

Foreign Minister Guillaume Long tweeted that 654 search experts from other nations were on the ground late Monday and that more were expected to arrive Tuesday — bringing to 13 the nationalities involved in the rescue.

The U.S. said Tuesday it would be sending experts and US$100,000 in assistance.