Alausí (Ecuador) (EFE) 52 more are expected to be found, amid fears that the mountain will collapse again.
Since the landslide devastated at least 57 houses on the night of Sunday March 26, the titanic rescue work has not stopped for a single day.
But progress is slow given the enormous size of the disaster, which reaches an area of more than 24 hectares and even covered the municipal soccer stadium.
Below, in some cases several meters deep, there are still entire families that abruptly disappeared under a huge mass of rocks and earth suddenly fallen on them.
One of those families is the husband and four children of María Juana Mishqui, an Andean woman who was left alone overnight and now begs for help to locate them.
“I lived in the house with my husband and my four little children. On Saturdays we would go to the fields and now I have been left alone, ”he tells EFE Mishqui between tears and sobs.
“I have been looking for them since that day they disappeared, but we have not been able to find picks because the depth of the earth is tremendous”, explains the lady.
That he waits for the machinery that removes the earth to reach the area where his house was located, but “it is more than 15 days and they are still far away.”
“We are not calm”
In a very similar situation is Narcisa Quiroz, who wakes up every day waiting to find her nephews, their mother and grandparents, and the son of one of them.
“It is what we have been waiting for since the first day this happened. Until today we are not calm. We want to recover the bodies and give them a Christian burial. We will not be calm until they are rescued”, affirms Quiroz, who regrets the contradictory information in the days before the tragedy.
Although the signs of an imminent landslide from the mountain had been there since the end of last year, with the appearance of large cracks in the upper part that even affected a road, not all families managed to evacuate the area in time.
Meanwhile, Juan Quinche, another resident of Alausí who has lost ten relatives, appreciates the support of the brigades of hundreds of police, military and firefighters who carry out the rescue work, but calls for more machinery to speed up the tasks.
Orange alert
And it is that to the tense and exhausting wait of the relatives of the victims who have not yet been recovered is now added the fear of a new landslide.
The existence of more cracks and the entry of water into the mass of land that has slipped as a result of the rains and the collapse of the sanitary infrastructure make the terrain truly unstable.
For this reason, since this week the General Secretariat of Risks of Ecuador has raised the alert from yellow to orange.
Due to the possibility of new landslides from the mountain in an area of some 214 hectares that includes the so-called “ground zero” and also five other neighboring neighborhoods.
One of those neighborhoods is Control Norte, whose inhabitants have been evacuated, among them Elizabeth Morocho, who sporadically goes to check her home.
“The neighborhood is at risk. I lived in the back and they made us get out of there because there is no water or electricity. They say that the mountain may collapse, what remains to be lowered,” the neighbor told EFE, who is demanding help from the authorities for a relocation.
Hundreds displaced by the avalanche in Ecuador
Most of those affected in this neighborhood are staying with friends or relatives in various other parts of the country, as is the case of Morocho’s 97-year-old grandmother, taken to the municipality of Durán, in the coastal area of country.
“You cannot be calm or live in peace like this, and many are people who have lived in this neighborhood for years. My grandmother wants to return to her house to live, ”she says.
In total there are more than a thousand victims and about a hundred remain in two of the four temporary shelters that were set up in the municipality.
Thus, in Alausí it is still a long way to recover the tranquility and normality that the mountain took away in this town classified as “magical” for its history and legends, and known touristically for the “Nariz del Diablo”, one of the steps most emblematic mountain railways in South America.