More than 170 dead after second strong quake rocks El Salvador

The temblor, felt as far away as Guatemala and Honduras, caused buildings to crumble on mountainsides around the capital and set off landslides on the country's volcanic slopes.

The Institute for Global Physics in Strasbourg said the 8:22 a.m. (1422 GMT) quake measured 5.7 on the Richter scale. The Salvadoran National Emergency Committee (COEN) said the tremor measured 6.1, far weaker than the magnitude-7.6 quake that January 13. The epicentre Tuesday, however, was not off the coast but in the interior of the densely populated country, intensifying its destructive effects. It was centred just 50 kilometres from the capital, San Salvador. President Francisco Flores travelled to the areas worst hit by the quake, which occurred exactly one month after the temblor that killed more than 800 people and left thousands homeless.

About 200,000 buildings were destroyed in that quake, and Tuesday's added about 20,000 to that number, according to estimates by expert Hajo Spoerhase with the Catholic aid group Caritas International. Hardest hit were the central provinces San Vincente, La Paz and Cuscutlan, east of the capital, which were relatively unscathed in last month's tremor. "There are towns there where 70 to 80 per cent of the houses were destroyed," Flores said. In the city Cojutepeque in Cuscutlan, which bore the brunt of the quake, 25 children are believed to be buried under the rubble of a school. Hospitals in the three provinces were filled with the injured as numerous landslides covered the earthquake zone with a cloud of dust. The cathedral tower in Sonsonate in western El Salvador crashed to the ground, and the Salvadoran Public Education Ministry cancelled all classes indefinitely as the government ordered public buildings evacuated. Flores requested medical aid from overseas, and the United States, Guatemala and Nicaragua sent helicopters to their Latin American neighbour Tuesday. Meanwhile, aid workers still on the ground in El Salvador after January's quake were scrambling to reorganize their operations. "We must rethink," Spoerhase said. "We were already in the phase of reconstruction, and now we are thrown back into the phase of emergency aid."

(dpa)