Nearly 50,000 people were ordered to evacuate their homes. Complete families are living in shelters. A bigger challenge is to replace the homes, especially in poor rural communities where houses were built with fragile wood and adobe. In San Salvador and remote areas, it is estimated that 120,000 homes were damaged and there are more that 1 million s victims. In these areas, there is little access for the necessary food, water and medicines.
Some families still hope to find their loved ones alive.
It is a possibility, and that is why scout teams are continuing to be sent out in response to these families. Communities are devastated by the deaths of their members. Now government agencies have stopped issuing estimates of the missing, because people are turning up after they were unable to communicate with frantic relatives. The earthquake is the latest blow to a struggling country. El Salvador is still recovering from the battering of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and from a deadly dengue fever epidemic.