PORTOVIEJO, Ecuador — 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.
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 — like the rest of downtown — by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake. She asked his boss to buy his casket.
But Cordova held out for 36 hours beneath the rubble, drinking his own urine and praying that service would be restored before his cellphone battery died. He was finally able to call his wife 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,” 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 flattened by the quake.
The official death toll was raised to 480 in the afternoon, but there was confusion about the number of missing.
