CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — Rescuers broadened their search of collapsed buildings in New Zealand’s quake-shattered city of Christchurch today, as hopes faded of finding any more survivors in the hardest-hit office blocks downtown.
Police said today that up to 120 bodies may still lie trapped in one of those buildings alone, though it was impossible to know the exact numbers caught in the tangled wreckage of concrete and steel that was the Canterbury Televisionbuilding.
Prime Minister John Key said that 92 bodies have been recovered after the magnitude-6.3 earthquake that struck Christchurch on Tuesday, in an interview with Sky News. About 200 families of missing people had been contacted by police, who had “every reason to believe” that the missing people may be fatalities.
“We know there are more bodies yet to be recovered and we are in the process of doing that,” police Superintendent Dave Cliff said at a news conference today.
Still, he cautioned that the list of missing almost certainly included people who had left town without notifying families or were otherwise all right.
Key has declared the quake a national disaster and analysts estimate its cost at up to $12 billion.
The damaged buildings in and around Christchurch numbered in the thousands, including many of the older structures in Lyttelton, a port town just southeast of the city and closer to the quake’s epicenter.
“It was just horrific,” 63-year-old teacher’s assistant Kevin Fitzgerald said of Tuesday’s quake. “I thought the devil was coming up out of the earth.”
The popular Ground deli and cafe was in ruins, huge slabs of its walls lying on the sidewalk in a jumbled pile. Glass shop-front windows had been blown out.
Hundreds of foreign specialists - from the U.S., Britain, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan - arrived in Christchurch to bolster local police and soldiers and allow teams to head farther afield to smaller buildings not yet checked.
“Now we’ve got the capability of going out and doing searches in areas where there may still be people trapped that hitherto we haven’t been able to address,” Civil Defense Minister John Carters said.
Police Superintendent Russell Gibson said that the last survivor had been pulled out at 2 p.m. Wednesday, and no one had been found trapped in the rubble since.
Gibson said the operation had become one of body recovery, though he rejected suggestions that rescuers were abandoning hope of finding anyone alive.
“Yes, we are still looking for survivors,” he said on National Radio. “There are pockets within a number of these buildings and, provided people haven’t been crushed, there is no reason to suggest we will not continue to get survivors out of there.”
The rescue effort had been concentrating on two office towers in downtown Christchurch that crumbled to the ground when the temblor struck shortly before 1 p.m., atthe height of a busy Tuesday.
At one of them, the Canterbury Television building, police said Tuesday that they had given up hope of finding any more survivors and the work going on there was recovery rather than potential rescue. Four mangled bodies were pulled from the rubble overnight Wednesday, Cliff said.
He said that “between the late 60s and 120 bodies, at the upper limit,” were still in the building.
The King’s Education language school, in the CTV building, released a list today on its website of 141 students and teachers associated with the facility, with at least 37 students, mostly Asians, missing and presumed in the building.
At least 10 other Asian students were injured and hospitalized, two of them severely injured. The status of an additional 44 teachers and students was unclear.
The city’s heavily damaged downtown was roped off for safety reasons, and one building, the Hotel Grand Chancellor, was feared likely to collapse.
Some people gathered outside the cordon to await news of missing relatives. One man who spoke to a local television network Wednesday had taken along his dog, believing it would have the best chance of sniffing out his missing mother. He had with him photographs of her to show the rescuers, and he fought back tears as he described “the coolest Mum ever.”
Cliff told reporters: “We really appreciate the fact that people are hurting. The agony of not knowing, all of us know that is a dreadful feeling, andthat’s what we’re trying to put to an end as soon as we humanly can.” Information for this article was contributed by Steve McMorran, Ray Lilley and Kelly Doherty of The Associated Press; by Chris Bourke of Bloomberg News and by Emma Stone and Meraiah Foley of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/24/2011