El Salvador Floods, Mudslides Kill 124, 60 Missing

People walk in a street damaged by heavy rains in San Salvador, Sunday, Nov. 8, 2009. El Salvador's interior minister says that 40 people have died throughout the country following three days of heavy rains. (AP Photo/Luis Romero)

(AP)

Mud and boulders loosened by heavy rains swept down a volcano and partly buried a small town Sunday, swallowing up homes as flooding and landslides across El Salvador killed at least 124 people, authorities said.

Hundreds of soldiers, police and residents dug through rock and debris in Verapaz looking for another 60 people missing from the mudslide, which struck before dawn Sunday while residents were still in their beds.

Matias Mendoza, 26, was at home with his wife Claudia and their year-old son, Franklin, when the earth began moving.

"It was about two in the morning when the rain started coming down harder, and the earth started shaking," Mendoza recalled. "I warned my wife and grabbed my son, and all of a sudden we heard a sound. The next thing I knew I was lying among parts of the walls of my house."

"A few minutes later, I found my wife and my son in the middle of the rubble, and, thank God, we're alive," said Mendoza, who suffered cuts on his cheek that emergency workers stitched up.

Almost 7,000 people saw their homes damaged by landslides or cut off by floodwaters following three days of downpours from a low-pressure system indirectly related to Hurricane Ida, which brushed Mexico's Cancun resort on Sunday before steaming into the Gulf of Mexico.

President Mauricio Funes declared a national emergency and said he would work with the United Nations to evaluate the extent of the damage.

"The images that we have seen today are of a devastated country," Funes said. He called the damages incalculable.

El Salvador's Civil Protection agency raised the death toll by to 124 late Sunday, with another 60 people missing. It didn't break down the deaths by location, but under the previous toll, officials had listed 61 deaths in San Salvador, 23 in San Vicente province, including 10 in Verapaz, and seven other fatalities spread across the country. Red Cross spokesman Carlos Lopez Mendoza said 60 people were missing in Verapaz.