Hours after a 6.2 magnitude quake shook Ecuador, President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday (April 20) that the death toll was 525 from Saturday’s even bigger quake.
The latest big tremor, which followed several hundred aftershocks from Saturday’s 7.8 quake, hit not far from Saturday’s quake– 25 km (15 miles) off the island of Muisne on the northwest coast at a depth of 15 km (9 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Correa said that, although the number of victims was high, rescue workers had saved dozens of people trapped in the rubble.
“You know that, unfortunately, we have 525 dead but 54 people have been rescued alive. That’s 10 percent which is quite high because we reacted quickly and with rescuers who are truly heroes, dedicated and sacrificed, I give them our gratitude in the name of the motherland.”
But, as days go on, rescuers were losing hope of finding anyone alive even as relatives of the missing begged them to keep looking.
Correa said he did not want to give false hope and that most of the efforts must focus on removing corpses because of public health concerns.
“There are stages. There are critical hours during which there is hope of life but, on the other hand, there are cadavers in the rubble that begin a decomposition process so we must deal with those cadavers and worry more about that than the remote possibility that someone is still alive. We are following all the protocols,” Correa said.
Local media said rescue operations were temporarily suspended after Wednesday’s quake, after which there were no immediate reports of deaths or major new damage.
More than 100 people are still missing and more than 4,600 were injured in that disaster, which destroyed about 1,500 buildings, triggered mudslides and tore up roads. Some 23,500 are sleeping in shelters, their homes and livelihoods crushed.
To help fund a long, multibillion-dollar reconstruction, Ecuador may issue bonds on the international market, President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday.
Correa, supervising work in the disaster zone, said the weekend quake had inflicted $2 billion to $3 billion of damage and could knock 2 to 3 percentage points off growth, meaning the economy could shrink this year. Lower oil revenue had already left the poor Andean nation of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment.
“We are looking at the possibility of issuing bonds in the international market but other measures have been planned. There’s a tax reform being discussed– Hopefully, this will put things into perspective…. Look at the tragedies, reasons why it is worth committing ourselves to, sacrificing ourselves– but we will obviously have to take temporary measures faced with the magnitude and unexpected nature of this expenditure,” he said, without giving further details.
Ecuador has said current high yields would make it too expensive to issue debt. Yields on its bonds are close to 11 percentage points higher than comparable U.S. Treasury debt, according to JPMorgan data.
Leftist Correa’s government in 2008 defaulted on bonds with a similar yield, calling bondholders “monsters” and the debt value unfair. Creditors are likely to be even more wary of Ecuador following the quake damage.