Monday, June 1, 2009

Earthquake Damage Report, part 1

Allen, Alan, and Pastor Hugo made the trip to La Iguala today, and they brought back hundreds of photos and many stories. I only have time to write a short post tonight, but I hope to add more photos tomorrow.

This is the home of an elderly couple. The walls of their home are severely damaged. The roof didn't fall in, as you might think from this photo - the first thing people do with the damaged buildings is to remove the salvageable clay tiles off the roof, in order to reuse them.


Here is a close-up of the house, so that you can see some of the damage to the walls.

The couple in this house might actually have enough money to rebuild (unlike most of the homeowners affected in this area), but it would mean spending all of their savings - basically their retirement funds would be gone.

We identified approximately 49 houses which are so badly damaged that they need to be torn down and rebuilt, and approximately 200 other houses which sustained serious damage, but which can probably be repaired. According to our research, about 250 people in the area of La Iguala are now homeless as a result of the earthquake, and a total of about 1250 people were affected by this disaster.

2 comments:

Live Simply Love Strongly said...

Can we help in any way?

Trish said...

Right now, we are contacting various disaster response organizations, to see if we can get some help with the cost of reconstruction some of these homes. Please pray with us that some of these groups will be able to help us - charitable groups are going through hard times right now, and funds are pretty scarce.