The desperate hunt for dozens of missing children at a Mexico City school partially flattened by a powerful earthquake became a race against time as dawn broke Wednesday.
At least 217 people were killed by Tuesday’s magnitude-7.1 quake and scores of buildings were destroyed.
Firefighters, police and local volunteers pulled at least 25 bodies, all but four of them children, from what had been the Enrique Rebsamen school in the south of the capital.
Crews wearing hard hats worked their way through pancaked concrete slabs, as family members and teachers searched through lists of children to try to work out who was unaccounted for.
Dr. Pedro Serrano, one of the volunteers, told the Associated Press that he managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble. He made it into a classroom, but found all of its occupants dead.
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“We saw some chairs and wooden tables. The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move rubble and we found a girl and two adults — a woman and a man,” he told the AP.
Eleven people were rescued alive from the partially collapsed school but 30 others were still missing as of 2 a.m. ET, according Mexican Education Minister Aurelio Nuño Mayer.
The tremor came on the 32nd anniversary of Mexico’s devastating earthquake of 1985 that killed 5,000 people, the deadliest in the country’s modern history.
Officials had been holding evacuation drills to mark the event just hours before Tuesday’s quake.
“A drill at 11 a.m. and an earthquake at 1 p.m.,” said 23-year-old student Valerie Perez, who ran from her apartment in Mexico City. “This is the most powerful thing I have ever seen in my life.”
An even more powerful earthquake struck last month, Mexico’s strongest in 100 years. But the damage was less widespread, with a death toll of nearly 100.
While considerably weaker, Tuesday’s earthquake was deadlier and more destructive.
The Enrique Rebsamen school was one of 44 buildings that collapsed across Mexico City alone, and around 40 percent of the capital and 60 percent of nearby Morelos state were without electricity, government officials said.
In Mexico City’s Reforma Avenue, thousands fled office buildings as they swayed under the stress of the tremor. In the neighborhood of Roma, rescue workers cheered after finding a woman alive under rubble. They then quieted down to listen for calls from other survivors.
Some 3,400 soldiers have been deployed to support the region and between 50 and 60 people have been rescued in total, according to Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera.
Robert W. Bouman was in Mexico City visiting family when the quake struck — the second he had experienced in Mexico in less than two weeks.
“It’s an incredibly terrifying and scary experience,” Bouman, 31, told NBC News. “This time, the quake was much more violent. We had trouble standing and walking. It was impossible to maintain your balance.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto was on a flight to Oaxaca when the quake struck and said in a tweet that he was immediately returning to Mexico City to assess the situation. The government declared an “extraordinary emergency” for the city.
President Donald Trump, who has clashed with Peña Nieto over his repeated calls for a border wall between their countries, sent his support in a tweet.