prayed in the earthquake-ravaged city of Christchurch on Sunday
as rescuers pulled apart levelled buildings in their desperate
search for survivors six days after the devastating tremor that
killed 147 people.
Rescue teams from New Zealand and seven countries, including
the United States, China, Japan, and Australia, scoured ruined
buildings in the central city and suburban areas hardest hit by
Tuesday's 6.3 tremor -- but found only the dead.
"They can see bodies that they are trying to get out,"
police shift commander Russell Gibson said.
The dead include people from 20 nations, including dozens of
students from Japan, China and Taiwan who were in Christchurch,
one of New Zealand's most attractive cities, to learn English in
view of the country's dramatic southern Alps.
The city's mayor clung to the hope that more would be found
alive, even as aftershocks brought down masonry and sent rescue
teams scrambling for safety.
"I will not stop hoping that we will find people alive in
the damaged structures of our city until I am told by the police
and the urban search and rescue teams that no such optimism can
exist any longer," Bob Parker told reporters.
SURVIVORS
No survivors have been rescued since mid-afternoon on
Wednesday. The number of missing remains at more than 200, but
police have said it is likely that the number includes recovered
bodies that have yet to be identified.
In the central city, the painstaking search concentrated on
a finance company office block, the city's landmark cathedral
and a local television building, which housed an English
language school.
Japanese, Chinese and English teams joined locals to pull
apart the buildings, where floors pancaked on top of each other,
brick by brick.
"What we're doing is removing the debris, we're looking for
voids or spaces where there may be the living," said fire rescue
head Jim Stuart Black.
Rescuers crawled through large steel tubes to get into the
core of the cathedral, where around 20 bodies are believed
trapped.
At the historic 155-year-old stone-built Holy Trinity
Anglican Church on the fringes of the devastated city centre,
Reverend Hugh Bowron said parishioners at the first service
since the quake were still stunned.
"The church was badly damaged in the last earthquake, and
won't be repairable now, so the sense of hope has taken on a
much grittier edge'" Bowron told Reuters.
"But most people were delighted just to be with each other,
just to know that others were still alive."
Prime Minister John Key said the national disaster insurance
fund of more than NZ$6 billion was likely to be decimated by the
cost of rebuilding Christchurch and will need to be replenished.
He said New Zealand Earthquake Commission (EQC) levies were
likely to rise.
On Sunday, Key also launched the Christchurch Earthquake
Appeal, a global fundraiser for the recovery effort in the city
and the Canterbury region.
Former prime minister Helen Clark, now based in New York as
head of the United Nations Development Programme, said the city
looked as bad as Haiti did after last year's quake that killed
more than 300,000.
"This is a city where the life has been squeezed out of it,"
Clark said on a private visit to the city.
She said the United Nations was unlikely to help, because
New Zealand would get through the disaster.
"I think in the
case of New Zealand, a developed country with a very strong
civil defence infrastructure, and with the support that's come
in from round the world, New Zealand will cope."
As rescue teams scoured ruined buildings, efforts were being
made to prop up the teetering 26-storey Hotel Grand Chancellor,
which had hampered search operations because of fears it would
collapse and bring down adjoining buildings.
In the devastated eastern suburbs where hundreds of homes
have been marked with red tape for demolition, thousands of
volunteers delivered food parcels and water, and shovelled metre
high stinking and contaminated grey silt that had squirted
through roads and gardens.
But there was frustration that relief and repair efforts in
the city of 400,000, New Zealand's second biggest, were not
happening fast enough.
Around a third of houses has no running water although 85
percent of the city now has power.
"We're just trying to look out for one another. The
aftershocks are still sending us flying," said Dave Pascoe in
the poorer suburb of Aranui.
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