Portoviejo, Ecuador
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 by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake like the rest of downtown. She asked his boss to buy his casket.
But Cordova held out for 36 hours beneath the rubble, drinking his own urine and praying service would be restored before his cellphone battery died. He was finally able to call his wife on 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.
The official death toll was raised to 480 in the afternoon, but there was confusion about the number of missing.
Deputy Interior Minister Diego Fuentes said 2,000 people had been reported as missing to a government registry created to track casualties. But it was not clear if all of those people remain unaccounted for. Ecuador’s Defense Ministry said 231 people were missing.