Man and daughter survive 13-story fall

Instead, the two fell 13 stories as their brand-new apartment building toppled like a felled tree, hugging each other all the way down.

Rozas had no idea which way was up until he looked through his apartment’s shattered window and spotted light, “the light of the full moon.’’ Rozas and his daughter, Fernanda, clambered up and to safety with nothing more than a few cuts, scrapes, and bruises.

“The earthquake and the fall were one single, horrible thing,’’ Rozas said. “I held onto her, and she never let me go.’’

Rozas’s neighbors, who lived on the other side of the hall, found themselves trapped beneath the structure, as rescuers painstakingly used electric saws and a generator-powered hammer to cut into the concrete.

As of yesterday 23 people had been pulled alive from the 15-story Rio Alta building, and seven bodies had been removed. An estimated 60 people remained trapped inside .

Socovil, the company that opened the concrete-and-glass structure last June, said that it had complied with all building codes. But many residents were angry, including Rozas. “The construction was obviously poor,’’ he said.

After they climbed out of the wreckage Saturday, Rozas took Fernanda to her mother’s house, then returned to help firefighters understand the layout of the toppled building. -- ASSOCIATED PRESS

He retrieved medicine and clothes for Fernanda - and his guitar.

“No one brings us anything; we are stuck here,’’ said Daniel Garcia, 28, a Peruvian immigrant who spent the night in the Barrio Brazil neighborhood of Santiago, sleeping on the street with his family surrounded by clothes and a radio. They brought their mattresses down two flights of stairs, piled their television atop a stack of rubble, and used wreckage from the street to build a makeshift shelter. His wife, Rosa, was desperate. “That wall is about to fall!’’ she said.

Two blocks away, Liliana Caceres, a Peruvian woman, slept on her sofa on a sidewalk. “It is safer here on the street than inside there,’’ she said, pointing to her apartment inside a three-story concrete building that now tilts heavily to one side. “In any moment the whole building could come down.’’

A group of children slept in a tent donated by neighbors. Surrounding the group were piles of clothes, canned fish, and what little else the families were able to salvage from their homes. -- WASHINGTON POST

But the devastating tidal surge never materialized, and by yesterday, authorities had lifted the warning after waves half the predicted size tickled Hawaii’s shores. Scientists acknowledged they overstated the threat but defended their actions, saying they applied the lessons of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed thousands of people who didn’t get enough warning.

Eugene Okamoto, 33, who was visiting Hilo, Hawaii, said his family understands the tsunami threat better than most because his relatives lived through a deadly tidal surge in 1960. “They did the right thing,’’ he said of the forecasters. -- ASSOCIATED PRESS