MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Tempers frayed in Mexico City on Friday as the search for survivors amidst twisted rubble of collapsed buildings began to wind down three days after the country’s most deadly earthquake in a generation.

The 7.1 magnitude quake leveled 52 buildings in the sprawling Mexican capital at lunchtime on Tuesday, leaving thousands homeless and close to 300 people dead. Apartment blocks, offices, a school and a textile factory were among the structures that were destroyed.

Across the city, thousands of rescue workers and special teams using sniffer dogs and heat sensors combed wreckage, while the massive outpouring of support from volunteers sparked global praise for Mexico’s spirit.

Efforts were not fast enough, though, for some family members waiting outside an office building that collapsed in the fashionable Roma neighborhood.

As storm clouds gathered over the city, families worried that rain could slow the pace of rescue efforts.

Protesters held signs addressed to President Enrique Pena Nieto and Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera.

“Mancera and EPN: We demand results” read one sign. “They are still alive. Don’t kill them” and “We don’t want machines” read others, referring to rumors that the military would use bulldozers to hasten removal of rubble deemed unlikely to harbor survivors.

Many sites had already been cleared of rubble by Friday afternoon and chances were dimming of finding anyone else alive.

U.S. rescue workers went to work Friday in the collapsed office building, looking for six people who were still missing.

Mexican soldiers and volunteers, supported by teams from as far afield as Israel and Japan, have so far rescued at least 60 people from the ruins in Mexico City and surrounding towns.

For many the search was highly personal.

Firefighter Teresa Ramirez Flores, 40, was helping search an office building in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood where her cousin Carolina Muniz, a 43-year-old accountant, was on the second floor when the building collapsed.

“We want to be superheroes so that our country doesn’t suffer,” she said at a site where volunteers brought a wheelbarrow filled with candy for the rescue teams.

After three days though, rescuers were finding more dead bodies than survivors and frustration was increasingly evident.

Luis Ruiz, a 39-year old carpenter, complained that the police would not let him enter the ruins where his sister and two of her children were buried in the rubble. “I felt powerless to be unable to get my family, unable to do anything,” he said.

HOMELESS, FORGOTTEN

Across the city of 20 million people, many whose dwellings had become uninhabitable sought a place to call home, raising the specter of a housing shortage. Senior officials said there could be 20,000 badly damaged homes in the states of Morelos and Puebla.

Julia Juarez, 56, sat in a park where the homeless set up tents. “All the help we have received is from the civilian population. The government has not sent anything at all,” she said. “No food, no clothes, no water, not even an Alka-Seltzer.”

Other Mexican volunteers complained of being displaced by foreign rescue workers who flew in to help.

Oscar Ruiz, a firefighter from the state of Guanajuato who had raced to the capital after the quake, said he was close to a survivor under the rubble and could hear a heartbeat with a listening device when his team was pulled to make way for Israeli and Japanese teams.

Members of rescue teams search for survivors in the rubble of a collapsed building after an earthquake in Mexico City, Mexico September 22, 2017. REUTERS/Henry Romero

“Do you think I wanted that?” Ruiz said. It was not clear what happened after he left the site.

In the hard-hit Roma neighborhood, Jorge Hernandez and a team of volunteers from Mexico City packed up to move on to isolated villages in Morelos. He said they were doing so after military commands declined their assistance.

Mexico City “is over saturated with support and there are very remote communities in Morelos that have not received help. That’s why we are going there. There, they need so much help,” Hernandez said.

EXHAUSTION, FRUSTRATION, BIG BLUNDER

Tuesday’s massive quake struck on the anniversary of the deadly 1985 tremor that killed some 5,000 people in Mexico City.

As the shock of this week began to subside, exhaustion crept in, along with growing discontent.

On Thursday, Mexico’s Navy apologized for communicating incorrect information in a story about a girl supposedly trapped under a collapsed school in Mexico City.

A frantic effort had been made to reach the child, dubbed Frida Sofia by local media, but it turned out that the widely-publicized story had been false, leading to anger.

Francisco Ortiz questioned whether attention directed at trying to rescue the phantom girl had diverted resources from other places where they were desperately needed, like the apartment building where his sister, Maria, was trapped beneath debris.

Authorities had waited until Thursday to begin searching the building. The owner, Juan Salazar, said all the renters had been accounted for before realizing that Ortiz’s sister Maria, a maid, had been washing clothes on the roof when the quake struck.

Salazar said he called civil protection and also implored passing brigades of rescue workers to help, but it was two days before rescue efforts began.

Slideshow (21 Images)

“It was negligence. Nobody wanted to take responsibility, neither the army nor Civil Protection,” said Ortiz.

On Friday afternoon, after a full day’s search, rescuers pulled Maria’s body from the rubble.

(For a graphic on 'Earthquake strikes Mexico' click here)</s>Mexico focuses on 10 buildings in search for quake survivors, 273 dead

Rescuers swarmed over rubble with shovels and picks on Thursday in a frantic search for survivors two days after Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in a generation, focusing on 10 collapsed buildings where people may still be alive, Reuters reported.

Those trapped included five Taiwanese workers in a textile factory in downtown Mexico City. But the Navy said a missing schoolgirl whose fate captured the nation “did not exist,” leading to an outpouring of anger over the mix-up.

The death toll was at least 273, officials said. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said 50 people were missing.

Working without pause since Tuesday afternoon’s 7.1-magnitude quake, first responders and volunteers have saved 60 survivors from central Mexico City to poor neighborhoods far to the south.

Late on Wednesday night, an eight-year-old girl was rescued from a collapsed building in the Tlalpan neighborhood, nearly 36 hours after the quake, local officials said.

Luis Manuel Carrillo Nunez, 14, said he was in a yoga class at the Enrique Rebsamen private school on Tuesday when he heard people yell, “It’s shaking!”

He ran to escape the building as it began collapsing. But some classmates never made it out.

“It’s hard to know that you’re not going to see again the friends that you loved. I‘m really traumatized,” he said.

The full scale of damage has not been calculated, with buildings across the city of 20 million people badly cracked. Citigroup’s Mexican unit Citibanamex told clients it was lowering its 2017 economic growth forecast to 1.9 percent from 2.0 percent due to the earthquake.

Some families made dangerous trips back into damaged structures to pull out possessions, and trucks with mattresses, furniture and televisions rumbled through the streets.</s>As per the information given by the officials, death toll of the powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake in Mexico has now reached to 273. Half of the deaths occurred in the capital Mexico City, where nearly 40 buildings collapsed, and the remainder in surrounding and nearby states.

According to a release from the national civil protection agency on Thursday, 137 people were killed in the capital, 73 in Morelos state, 43 in Puebla state, 13 in the State of Mexico, six in Guerrero state and one person in Oaxaca state, Xinhua news agency reported.

The toll is likely to rise as rescue operations continue and bodies are retrieved from the rubble of buildings destroyed by the quake, the agency said. In an interview with local media, Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said authorities have recovered the bodies of 87 women and 50 men, including 25 minors.

“Until all hope is lost, we will continue the rescue efforts in zones damaged by the quake,” Mancera posted to Twitter. The local government, he added, has declared the city to be in a state of disaster to facilitate federal funding for the reconstruction effort.

Some 5,000 residents forced from their homes are currently at 47 temporary shelters opened around the city, he said.

 The number of buildings that collapsed stands at 38, while the number of buildings that sustained damaged has risen to 2,900, he said. Rescue efforts are ongoing at 10 of 38 buildings that toppled in the capital, Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto said earlier in the day, during a visit to a town in Puebla that was hard hit. “We will have to maintain the rescue efforts to find people who are still alive under the rubble,” Pena Nieto said.</s>MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Rescuers swarmed over rubble with shovels and picks on Thursday in a frantic search for survivors two days after Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in a generation, focusing on 10 collapsed buildings where people may still be alive.</s>Rescue workers search for survivors, some holding their arms up as a sign to maintain silence, at an apartment building located on Amsterdam street. Pic/PTI

The toll from Tuesday's powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake in Mexico has climbed to 273, officials said. Half of the deaths occurred in the capital Mexico City, where nearly 40 buildings collapsed, and the remainder in surrounding and nearby states.

According to a release from the national civil protection agency on Thursday, 137 people were killed in the capital, 73 in Morelos state, 43 in Puebla state, 13 in the State of Mexico, six in Guerrero state and one person in Oaxaca state, Xinhua news agency reported.

The toll is likely to rise as rescue operations continue and bodies are retrieved from the rubble of buildings destroyed by the quake, the agency said. In an interview with local media, Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said authorities have recovered the bodies of 87 women and 50 men, including 25 minors.

"Until all hope is lost, we will continue the rescue efforts in zones damaged by the quake," Mancera posted to Twitter. The local government, he added, has declared the city to be in a state of disaster to facilitate federal funding for the reconstruction effort.

Some 5,000 residents forced from their homes are currently at 47 temporary shelters opened around the city, he said. The number of buildings that collapsed stands at 38, while the number of buildings that sustained damaged has risen to 2,900, he said.

Rescue efforts are ongoing at 10 of 38 buildings that toppled in the capital, Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto said earlier in the day, during a visit to a town in Puebla that was hard hit. "We will have to maintain the rescue efforts to find people who are still alive under the rubble," Pena Nieto said.

Experts say earthquake victims can survive up to 72 hours, or three days, without water. With the quake occurring at a little past 1 p.m. on Tuesday, that would mean the chances of finding survivors would fall considerably by that time on Friday.

The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) announced it restored power to nearly 95 percent of regions that suffered a blackout following the strongest quake to hit the capital in three decades. The Health Ministry said hospitals have treated 2,633 people injured in the quake, most in the capital, where 1,998 people suffered injuries.</s>A Mexican official says there are no missing children at a collapsed Mexico City school where rescuers have been hunting for a girl they believed to be trapped.

Assistant navy secretary Angel Enrique Sarmiento said there is evidence of a person who may still alive, but he says it's probably a school worker.

The search for the supposedly missing girl has been a focus of attention across the country as a symbol of hope following Tuesday's magnitude 7.1 earthquake.

Sarmiento said 11 children were rescued alive after the quake, while 19 children and six adults died at Enrique 

 Rebsamen school.

Thousands of professionals and volunteers worked frantically at dozens of wrecked buildings across the capital and nearby states looking for survivors of the magnitude 7.1 quake that killed at least 273 people in central Mexico and injured over 2,000.
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Late Thursday morning, rescuers were trying to reinforce what's left of the school as part of the efforts to free possible survivors.

The remains of the building had shifted dangerously earlier Thursday morning, prompting some rescuers to evacuate the top of the rubble pile.

Workers are using iron beams to prop up the structure. It took a dozen or more men to carry each one.

Rescuers carried in lengths of wide steel pipe big enough for someone to crawl through, apparently trying to create a tunnel into the collapsed slabs of the three-storey school building. But a heavy rain fell during the night, and the tottering pile of rubble had to be shored up with hundreds of wooden beams.

Stretchers have also been brought to the edge of the building. A large crane is also on site.

The death toll rose after Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said the number confirmed to have died had risen from 100 to 115.

Mancera also said two women and a man had been pulled alive from a collapsed office building in the city's centre Wednesday night, almost 36 hours after the quake.

'You still hear people in there'

Even as President Enrique Pena Nieto declared three days of mourning, soldiers, police, firefighters and everyday citizens kept digging through rubble, at times with their hands gaining centimetres at a time, at times with cranes and backhoes to lift heavy slabs of concrete.

"There are still people groaning. There are three more floors to remove rubble from. And you still hear people in there," said Evodio Dario Marcelino, a volunteer working with dozens of others at a collapsed apartment building.

A man was pulled alive from a partly collapsed apartment building in northern Mexico City more than 24 hours after the quake and was taken away in a stretcher, apparently conscious.

Nieto later said he believed people may still be alive in 10 collapsed buildings in the capital.

People have rallied to help their neighbours in a huge volunteer effort that includes people from all walks of life in Mexico City, where social classes seldom mix. Doctors, dentists and lawyers stood alongside construction workers and street sweepers, handing buckets of debris or chunks of concrete hand to hand down the line.

At a collapsed factory building closer to the city's centre, giant cranes lifted huge slabs of concrete from the towering pile of rubble, like peeling layers from an onion. Workers with hand tools would quickly move in to look for signs of survivors and begin attacking the next layer.

Government rescue worker Alejandro Herrera said three bodies had been found Wednesday afternoon at the factory.

"There are sounds [beneath the rubble], but we don't know if they are coming from inside or if it is the sound of the rubble," Herrera said.

In addition to those killed in Mexico City, the federal civil defence agency said 69 died in Morelos state just south of the capital and 43 in Puebla state to the southeast, where the quake was centred. The rest of the deaths were in Mexico state, which borders Mexico City on three sides, Guerrero and Oaxaca states.

In Atzala in Puebla state, villagers mourned 11 family members who died inside a church when it crumbled during a baptism for a two-month-old girl. People at the wake said the only ones to survive were the baby's father, the priest and the priest's assistant.

Power was being restored in some Mexico City neighbourhoods that already spent a day without power. The mayor said there were 38 collapsed buildings in the capital, down from the 44 he had announced previously.

There are currently 3,320 Canadians known to be in Mexico. Registration with the federal government is voluntary, however, and that figure "may not reflect the actual number," said Philip Hannan, spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada.

"As of Wednesday morning, there have been no reports of Canadian casualties," he said.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said, "The government of Canada is ready to assist Mexico as needed and appropriate."

She stressed that Canadians requiring consular assistance should contact Global Affairs toll-free at 1-613-996-8885 or by email at sos@international.gc.ca.</s>(MEXICO CITY) — As painstaking attempts to reach survivors in quake-ravaged buildings across Mexico City stretched into a third day Thursday, desperation mounted among loved ones who earlier had high hopes for quick rescues and some complained they were being kept in the dark about search efforts.

And what many had clung to as the unlikely triumph of life over death was revealed to be a case of some very high-profile misinformation: A top navy official announced there were no missing children at a collapsed Mexico City school where the purported plight of a girl trapped alive in the rubble had captivated people across the nation and abroad.

President Enrique Pena Nieto's office raised the death toll from Tuesday's magnitude 7.1 earthquake to 273, including 137 in the capital. In a statement, it said there were also 73 deaths in Morelos state, 43 in Puebla, 13 in the State of Mexico, six in Guerrero and one in Oaxaca.

More than 2,000 were injured and more than 50 people rescued in Mexico City alone, including two women and a man pulled alive from the wreckage of a building in the city's center Wednesday night.

Still, frustration was growing as the rescue effort stretched into Day 3.

Outside a collapsed office building in the trendy Roma Norte district, a list of those rescued was strung between two trees. Relatives of the missing compared it against their own list of those who were in the building when the quake struck — more than two dozen names — kept in a spiral notebook.

Patricia Fernandez's 27-year-old nephew, Ivan Colin Fernandez, worked as an accountant in the seven-story building, which pancaked to the ground taking part of the building next door with it.

She said the last time the family got an update was late yesterday, when officials said about 14 people were believed to be alive inside. Three people have been rescued from the building since the quake.

"They should keep us informed," Fernandez said as her sister, the man's mother, wept into her black fleece sweater. "Because I think what kills us most is the desperation of not knowing anything."

Referring to rumors that authorities intend to bring in heavy machinery that could risk bringing buildings down on anyone still alive inside, Fernandez said: "That seems unjust to us because there are still people alive inside and that's not OK."

"I think they should wait until they take the last one out," she said.

Seeking to dispel the rumors, National Civil Protection chief Luis Felipe Puente tweeted that heavy machinery "is NOT being used" in search-and-rescue efforts.

"The (hashtag)Search and Rescue is not being suspended anywhere it is believed that trapped people exist," Puente said in a separate tweet.

Since early Wednesday, the eyes of the nation had been focused on the Enrique Rebsaman school in southern Mexico City, where rescuers told reporters a girl, identified only as Frida Sofia, had signaled she was alive deep in the rubble by wiggling her fingers in response to rescuers' shouts.

Numerous rescuers at the school site spoke of the girl, with some saying she had reported several other children alive in the same space, and the child became a symbol of hope amid a disaster that has shocked the country. But with TV cameras and journalists kept a block away from the precarious site, the only images broadcast live around-the-clock of the purported rescue showed long-distance shots of rescuers digging and no images of a child.

As the rescue effort continued into Thursday, no family members came forward to identify the girl, and some officials had begun to say the identity of the person trapped in the rubble was not clear.

Then on Thursday afternoon, Navy Assistant Secretary Enrique Sarmiento announced that while there were blood traces and other signs suggesting someone could be alive beneath the school, all its children had been accounted for.

"We have done an accounting with school officials and we are certain that all the children either died, unfortunately, are in hospitals or are safe at their homes," Sarmiento said.

He said 11 children had been rescued and 19 had died, along with six adults, including a school employee whose body was recovered about 5 a.m. Thursday.

"We want to emphasize that we have no knowledge about the report that emerged with the name of a girl," Sarmiento added. "We do not believe, we are sure, it was not a reality."

Alfredo Padilla, a volunteer rescuer at the school, downplayed the importance of the revelation that there was no trapped child.

"It was a confusion," Padilla said. "The important thing is there are signs of life and we are working on that."

Earlier in the day, rescuers removed dirt bucketful by bucketful and passed a scanner over the rubble every hour or so to search for heat signatures that could indicate trapped survivors. Shortly before dawn the pile shuddered ominously, prompting those working atop it to evacuate.

"With the shaking there has been, it is very unstable and taking any decision is dangerous," said Vladimir Navarro, a university employee who was exhausted after working all night.

The shaky wreckage was reinforced with massive iron beams, each requiring a dozen or more men to carry and lift into place. Stretchers were brought to the edge of the building, and a large crane was also on site.

Lourdes Huerta, 10, was on an upper floor of a part of the school that did not collapse and returned to the site Thursday with her mother as the rescue was under way.

When the quake struck, "it was like we were bouncing up and down," Huerta said, nervously fingering a stuffed animal. "When I left the classroom the whole school was moving and we couldn't go downstairs, so we went back into the classroom and huddled up against the walls."

She said she was terrified when a wall collapsed, but said if they had tried the stairs "we would have ended up being thrown about."

Her mother, Lourdes Prieto, said the school's director and many of its teachers were among the injured, complicating efforts to produce a reliable list of students. So parents were organizing among themselves to come up with one.

"What we need above all is for a census to be taken of those of us who are alive," said Prieto, torn between gratitude that her two children had survived and anguish over the missing and the dead.

Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson and videojournalist Alexis Triboulard contributed to this report from Mexico City.</s>Mexico focuses on 10 buildings in search for quake survivors, 273 dead (VIDEO)

Peregrina, an indigenous Zapotec transgender woman, walks on the debris of her house destroyed after an earthquake that struck on the southern coast of Mexico late on Thursday, in Juchitan September 10, 2017. — Reuters picMEXICO CITY, Sept 22 — Rescuers swarmed over rubble with shovels and picks yesterday in a frantic search for survivors two days after Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in a generation, focusing on 10 collapsed buildings where people may still be alive.

Those trapped included five Taiwanese workers in a textile factory in downtown Mexico City. But the Navy said a missing schoolgirl whose fate captured the nation “did not exist,” leading to an outpouring of anger over the mix-up.

The death toll was at least 273, officials said. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said 50 people were missing.

Working without pause since Tuesday afternoon’s 7.1-magnitude quake, first responders and volunteers have saved 60 survivors from central Mexico City to poor neighborhoods far to the south.

Late on Wednesday night, an eight-year-old girl was rescued from a collapsed building in the Tlalpan neighborhood, nearly 36 hours after the quake, local officials said.

Luis Manuel Carrillo Nunez, 14, said he was in a yoga class at the Enrique Rebsamen private school on Tuesday when he heard people yell, “It’s shaking!”

He ran to escape the building as it began collapsing. But some classmates never made it out.

“It’s hard to know that you’re not going to see again the friends that you loved. I’m really traumatized,” he said.

The full scale of damage has not been calculated, with buildings across the city of 20 million people badly cracked. Citigroup’s Mexican unit Citibanamex told clients it was lowering its 2017 economic growth forecast to 1.9 per cent from 2 per cent due to the earthquake.

Some families made dangerous trips back into damaged structures to pull out possessions, and trucks with mattresses, furniture and televisions rumbled through the streets.

Despite a massive effort by volunteers and the armed forces to gather and distribute food and basic medicines, help has not reached everybody.

Thousands of people were sleeping in their cars, rather than going to shelters or damaged homes, and in the badly damaged streets in the south of the city some people held up signs begging for food.

While food, water, medicine, blankets and other basic items have been donated, some residents complained that emergency services were slow to arrive to poorer southern neighborhoods of the city, and that wealthier districts appeared prioritized.

Disaster relief is sensitive for politicians in Mexico after the government’s widely panned response to the 1985 quake caused upheaval, which some credited with weakening the one-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

In a statement late yesterday, the PRI said it would be donating 258 million pesos ($14.42 million), or 25 per cent of its annual federal funding, to help those afflicted.

Similarly, the national human rights commission proposed changing the Mexican constitution to divert about 30 per cent of political parties’ funding to a federal disaster fund.

Calls for political austerity gathered momentum on social media following a powerful quake less than two weeks ago that killed nearly 100 people in the south of the country. After that tremor, current leftist presidential frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador suggested donating 20 per cent of his party’s federal campaign funds for victims, which was well received.

After more than a day of wall-to-wall television coverage of the search for a girl in the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen school, the Navy changed its version of events and said all pupils were now accounted for.

Since Wednesday, rescue workers told leading broadcaster Televisa that a schoolgirl was trapped in the rubble, a version confirmed by the admiral in charge of the rescue effort at the school, who yesterday said the information came from the International Red Cross.

Senior Navy official Angel Enrique Sarmiento said he believed one adult was still alive under the rubble. Rescue work continued at the school.

The search for the girl, whom some local media outlets named “Frida Sofia,” captured hearts in a nation desperate for good news. As it became clear that the trapped person was not a child, there was an outpouring of anger on social media directed at broadcaster Televisa and the Navy for raising hopes.

Eleven other children were rescued from the same school, where students are aged roughly 6 to 15, the Navy said, adding that 19 children and six adults there were killed.

The body of a woman was pulled out yesterday morning.

Officials sought to quash rumors that the military would be bulldozing razed buildings deemed unlikely to harbor survivors.

“We won’t suspend the search and rescue mission we’ve been given until we find the last of the survivors,” army chief Salvador Cienfuegos said on Twitter.

The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed five nationals were trapped in a collapsed clothing factory in the Obrera neighborhood. Volunteers cutting through debris at the factory, which had been combed by rescue dogs, heard signs of life from a car.

Rescue worker Amaury Perez said, “We shouted, ‘If you are inside the vehicle, please knock three times.’ He knocked three times.”

Armed soldiers guarded abandoned buildings at risk of collapse. Some 52 buildings collapsed in Mexico City alone and more in the surrounding states.

The extensive damage to many buildings, some of them relatively new, raised questions over construction standards which were supposed to have improved after the 1985 quake.

Tuesday’s quake came on the anniversary of that temblor, which killed thousands and still resonates in Mexico. Annual Sept. 19 earthquake drills were being held a few hours before the nation got rocked once again. — Reutersa</s>MEXICO CITY—Mexican authorities raced against the clock Friday to find the last survivors who could remain beneath the rubble of several buildings destroyed by Tuesday´s powerful earthquake, even as the death toll rose to 286.

There was still hope of finding people alive. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Mancera said nine people were rescued Thursday. Rescuers, backed by scores of specialized foreign teams from Japan and elsewhere, worked...</s>The death toll in the powerful 7.1 magnitude earthquake that rattled Mexico on Tuesday climbed to 250 as rescue workers backed by an army of volunteers on Thursday searched for survivors buried under mounds of rubble, officials said.

The quake turned dozens of buildings in central Mexico into dust and debris, killing at least 250 people, Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera told CNN affiliate Foro TV.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto declared three days of national mourning and said the death toll was expected to rise in the coming days as rescue workers combed through tonnes of rubble. "Mexico shares your pain" was posted on the President's official Twitter account as the period of mourning was announced.

Meanwhile, at a collapsed school, where the bodies of nearly two dozen school children were found, rescue teams raced against the clock to reach a trapped girl, who had wriggled fingers from the rubble to show she was alive.

The girl, identified only as Frida Sofía, told rescuers there were other students nearby but she could not tell if they were alive. More than 30 children were still unaccounted for.

Rescuers had been hauling chunks of lumber and concrete from the debris as others tried to shore up parts of the collapsed structure with beams. Workers were close to pinpointing the girl's location on Thursday morning, Mexican Navy Adm. Jose Luis Vergara told Foro TV.

"At this moment we know that at least one girl is alive inside," Vergara said.

At least 44 buildings collapsed completely in Mexico City, according to official figures, with thousands left damaged and unstable in the sprawling city, which is built on a drained lake bed. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera said 52 people had been pulled alive from the rubble of collapsed buildings.

A total of 115 were killed in Mexico City, Mancera confirmed.

The President ordered the evacuation of patients from damaged hospitals amid widespread power cuts and fears of more buildings collapsing from aftershocks.

It was the second major earthquake to hit Mexico in two weeks and came on the anniversary of the 1985 quake that devastated Mexico City, killing thousands. Just hours before the latest quake, many people took part in drills and commemorative events.

Many residents spent a second night in parks and plazas, in tents or makeshift shelters, unable or unwilling to return to their homes as authorities inspected some 600 buildings whose walls swayed and cracked when the quake struck.

US President Donald Trump called President Peña Nieto to offer condolences, and the White House said it was offering search-and-rescue assistance.

Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray thanked the international community for offers of help in an unusual special intervention at the UN General Assembly.
Rescuers are focusing on 10 collapsed buildings where people may still be alive. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera reports the death toll is now at least 273, with 50 people still missing.