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| Search continues for victims among hospital rubble |
(CNN)Heroes are often made suddenly, when tragedy strikes out of nowhere. It did Thursday, when a natural gas explosion flattened a maternity hospital in Mexico City.
It
was dawn, and Police Officer Mauro Enrique Vera Suarez was in the
middle of suiting up for work. The shock wave jolted his station like an
earthquake.
It swung the doors and windows.
Suarez and his colleagues went outside. "They told us there was an explosion," he told CNN affiliate FOROtv.
Only
half equipped, he jumped straight into his squad car. "We left as we
were," he said. And rushed to the site marked by broad billows of smoke
and dust towering over the city.
Leaky gas hose
The
hose of a propane-butane truck had burst, while it made a delivery to
the Cuajimalpa Maternal Hospital. Combustible gas had hissed out into
the neighborhood.
Residents had
already called firefighters to alert them to the leak minutes before the
gas ignited, and the hospital had already begun evacuating. But the
exposition hit them in the middle of it.
More than 100 people were still in the building.
Officer
Suarez arrived to find the hospital for newborns and their mothers
leveled to crumbled concrete and twisted steel. People stained in blood
were screaming for help.
Under a piece of metal
He
and the other officers went straight into the wreckage looking for
injured survivors. He turned over pieces of the collapsed roof to see if
victims were under them.
"I saw a
sheet that was moving very slightly," he said. "Picking it up, I saw
that the baby was face down with its head and knees in the rubble."
The baby did not appear to be terribly injured, Suarez told FOROtv.
"He had small wounds. He had scrapes. What I did was just wrap him up and pick him up and leave running."
A snap, a tweet
Holding the baby in his left arm, Suarez signaled with his right hand to colleagues, directing them to go inside to help more injured people.
At that moment, someone snapped a photo of him, as he scurried over jumbled pieces of debris.
A public safety official sent it out via Twitter with the message:
"'I
would like to know what happened with the baby. Our work is to save
lives,'" says Mauro after rescuing a baby from the explosion."
FOROtv asked Suarez about the tweet.
"Yes, I would like to know that he is ok, the baby," he said, choking up.
Painful announcement
In
the evening, Mexico City's health secretary Armando Ahued spoke to
reporters about the tragedy. A nurse died, he said, as well as two
babies. Dozens were injured, about a third of them children.
Reporters asked him about the newborn in the tweeted photo.
The
baby was one of the two who didn't make it. "It was a baby that
had....a very serious fracture in its head, and unfortunately died,"
Ahued said.
"It's very sad news," Suarez told CNNMexico. He has two grown children himself. He sent a message to the baby's parents.
"I will be with them in their pain."
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