The town of Alausí, in the Andes of Ecuador, woke up this Monday partially buried by a gigantic avalanche after breaking off part of the mountain and destroying, for the moment, seven lives and dozens of houses and people who are still under tons of earth.
In addition to the seven deaths already confirmed, the missing amount to 64, according to the latest report from the National Risk Secretariat, which initially erroneously reported sixteen fatalities.
So far, 32 people have been rescued alive and there are 23 injured, in addition to 22 victims, corresponding to five families that have been transferred to temporary shelters installed in this municipality in the Andean province of Chimborazo.
Half a thousand affected people have also been registered in the area, corresponding to 163 homes.
The landslide occurred around 10:00 p.m. local time on Sunday (3:00 GMT on Monday), when most of the people were already sheltered in their homes, but its magnitude could only be appreciated once dawn had allowed Observe the devastated area, which covers 24.3 hectares.
With the first rays of the sun, it was observed how the mountainside rushed over the sector of the population called Casual until it reached the lower part of the Alausí Municipal Stadium, whose structure has completely collapsed.
The scene revealed by dawn confirmed the worst forecasts of a very long night in this Andean town, where the Alausí firefighters and groups of volunteers had tried to make the first rescues with shovels.
“Alausí has ??lost too much with so many families killed, entire families,” Susana Llamuca, president of the affected neighborhoods, told EFE, who has little hope that the disappeared can be found alive.
Meanwhile, another neighbor who was walking to try to find the location of the houses of her acquaintances and relatives, assured EFE that “there must be many people below.”
Late in the day, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, arrived in the area, asking to keep the hope of finding some people still alive.
Otherwise, the president guaranteed to do everything possible to recover the bodies and deliver them to their relatives.
In an impromptu statement near “ground zero”, the residents asked the head of state to expedite state aid and the arrival of heavy machinery, but he pointed out that it could be counterproductive to enter with these vehicles on still unstable ground.
Firefighters from eight cities in the country and search and rescue teams (USAR) from Quito and Cuenca have attended the emergency, which together with neighbors and personnel from other State institutions are trying to remove debris and find signs of life.
For this reason, rescuers sometimes ask for absolute silence to try to hear any sign of possible survivors.
There was also Jacob, a dog that was moved by his desperation when trying to dig into the immense avalanche with the instinct of finding his family buried by the landslide. He sniffed and scratched, sobbed and waited for someone to return his own.
The indications that the enormous landslide was going to happen had been occurring since the first days of December 2022, when the E35 highway began to sink and cracks appeared that over the days became more than a meter wide. .
The National Risk Secretariat assured in its report that on March 11 it had sent the governor (government delegate) of Chimborazo and the mayor of Alausí a technical report that recommended and requested the evacuation of the population, among other measures.
Even on the day of the tragedy, local authorities had made a tour in the morning to inspect the state of the cracks and alert the residents of the area of ??the potentially dangerous situation for their lives.
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