MANTA, Ecuador —The U.S. is deploying disaster experts to Ecuador and sending $100,000 in supplies as the country grapples with tens of thousands of people displaced by Saturday’s earthquake.
The U.S. Agency for International Development announced Tuesday that it was joining the effort to help survivors of Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake in the South American country. Teams from Mexico, Switzerland, Colombia, Venezuela and other countries are already in place. The agency said U.S. workers will help analyze the situation on the ground and work to meet humanitarian needs.
Complicating rescue efforts is the lack of electricity in many areas, meaning noisy power generators must be used, making it harder to hear people who might be trapped beneath rubble.
The Ecuadoran government reported Monday that the official death count had increased to 433 and was expected to rise further in the days ahead. Among the dead were an American and two Canadians. More than 2,000 people were injured.
Spain’s Red Cross said as many as 5,000 people might need temporary housing because of destroyed homes and 100,000 need some sort of aid. Another 231 were reported missing.
A nun from Northern Ireland killed in the Ecuador earthquake has been remembered as a “superstar” by her family.
A Roman Catholic religious order says Sister Clare Theresa Crockett was leading a group of young trainee nuns to safety at a school where she worked when a stairwell collapsed. She and five of the young postulants died. Three injured nuns were rescued from the rubble.
Crockett, who was 33 and from Londonderry, taught music at the Colegio Sagrada Familia school in Playa Prieta.
The order of the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother said Crockett and other nuns had been working to help residents hit by heavy local flooding when the earthquake struck on Saturday.
The order said in a statement that “Sister Clare had spent nearly 15 years of her life in consecration to the Lord. She was a generous Sister with a special gift for reaching out to children and young people.”
Crockett’s cousin Emmet Doyle said: “She was a superstar. Everybody loved her.”
“She died as she lived, helping others.”
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