Nine employees at Cruz Roja Chapala are back home after five days of intense labor in Mexico City, where they were assigned to dig out ruins left by the calamitous September 19 earthquake.
They were mobilized within hours after the quake hit, joining the Jalisco Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) brigade that arrived in the nation’s capital at dawn the following day to evaluate damages, identify risks and search for victims buried beneath various collapsed buildings. With those first response tasks completed, the Chapala team returned to its Guadalajara base camp on Monday, September 25.
Later in the week, team captain José Manuel Siordia Moya shared details of the Chapala team’s experiences with the Guadalajara Reporter. He explained that he and his colleagues were dispatched to different locations around the capital, including the site of an eight-story hotel completely pancaked by the 7.1-magnitude tremor where they recovered the crushed bodies of several victims. No survivors were found at that scene.
“The first hours of our work were complicated due to the interference of many well-meaning citizens who were desperately scrambling to move debris in search of victims. Lacking knowledge of appropriate rescue techniques, they actually increased the danger of additional collapse of the wreckage,” he observed.
He attributed the short duration of the local group’s stay on the ground to its expertise in immediate search and rescue efforts, generally carried out within the first 72 hours of a disaster.
In addition to Siordia Moya, the rest of the Chapala specialists taking part in the search and rescue effort were Montserrat Guzmán Martínez, Octavio Alcántar Moreno, José González Reyes, Cristopher Martínez Ramírez, Carlos Eduardo Mayet Reyes, Weyler Samuel Ruiz Us, Ángel Heriberto Siordia Moya and Marcos Antonio Zaragoza Tejeda.
Other Chapala natives affiliated with different organizations have also participated in earthquake relief.
Lorenzo Antonio Salazar Guerrero, former head of Chapala’s Civil Protection and Firefighters Unit (PCyB), was among 90 troopers from the Zapopan Civil Protection task force sent to the state of Morelos where damages nearest the quake’s epicenter were most severe. He assisted in the rescue of several survivors, recovering the dead and dispensing humanitarian aid to the thousands of people still suffering from the widespread devastation.
Mario Alberto González Ríos, currently employed at PCyB in Tlaquepaque, is on the team sent to Jojutla, Morelos to deliver ten tons of basic provisions donated by inhabitants of the Guadalajara suburb. At press time he was still assisting in a town that was practically flattened by quake damage. Hundreds of homes and historic buildings were totally destroyed, nearly 200 inhabitants injured and the death toll there stands at 73 to date.
And Chapala native Oscar Jesús Gómez Santacruz, a commander with Jalisco’s state Civil Protection and Firefighters Unit, remains in Mexico City where his USAR brigade is assigned to coordinating excavations of a collapsed apartment building in the Colonia Roma. They helped save 24 trapped dwellers in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and continue working shoulder-to-shoulder with rescue teams from Japan, Colombia and the United States to dig out the mass of rubble where 21 bodies have been retrieved so far.