In the shadow of San Francisco, the "cool gray city of love," beneath a mountain of slag and concrete, 6-year-old Julio Berumen lost his mother and his right leg.
He, his mother, his 8-year-old sister, Cathy, and another woman were in a car funneling through the lower tier of the Nimitz Freeway near the Bay Bridge linking Oakland and San Francisco when crustal plates of the Pacific and North America nudged each other.Scientists call it a strike slip.
It was Tuesday, 5:04 p.m. The third game of the nearby World Series between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics was about to begin. The sun was shining. But the lights dimmed for Julio and his sister. The highway's upper-deck supports snapped like matchsticks The seismic hiccup carried a force of 2,000 kilotons of TNT. Nimitz, or Interstate 880, was a stone sarcophagus. Julio and Cathy were inside.
A freeway crossbeam slammed into the car carrying the children, crumpling it like a tin can. The children's mother and the other woman died almost instantly. The boy's left leg was pinned under the seat, his right leg pinned and mangled by the fallen crossbeam.
Rescuers crawled through the smoking ruins with only a few feet of clearance in a structure described by officials as "a house of cards" that could tumble down at any moment.
It took two hours to free the girl, but after another three hours they still had not freed Julio from beneath his dead mother. Rescuers decided the only way to get the child was to cut the mother's body in two with a chain saw, free his left leg from under the seat and take off his mangled right leg.
Dr. James Betts, a trauma surgeon from Oakland's Children's Hospital, performed the surgery at the scene. He gave Julio an injection and then cut off the leg in a procedure that lasted about 10 minutes. Betts was lying on his stomach, and his partner was lying on the back of the car, his back jammed against the concrete.
"I don't think he's going to recall much of the trauma," Betts said afterward. "Accident victims . . . often develop amnesia to overcome pain."
Both children were in stable and improving condition Saturday, Children's Hospital reported.
A spokeswoman at the hospital said gifts, primarily stuffed animals, were beginning to arrive from across the country for the children. A bank that set up a trust fund for the two survivors said checks were beginning to pour in.
It was too early to estimate when the children might be discharged from the hospital.
President Bush said the "most touching moment" during his Friday tour of the quake's devastation was talking by the phone to the children's father, who was at the boy's bedside.
"I had a chance to tell him that the American people were rooting for him, to tell his dad that we all care," the president said.
Bush also talked with Betts, and in remarks later at nearby Moffett Naval Air Station in Mountain View told reporters: "So this human dimension is brought home much more clearly by coming here.
"The most touching moment was . . . when this doctor, this marvelously heroic doctor and his associate told me of pulling a kid out and having to amputate his leg to get him out of this crushed car."