'It's the end of the world': Ecuador earthquake claims 262 lives

Rescue crews searched desperately through rubble Sunday for survivors of a magnitude-7.8 earthquake that struck coastal Ecuador.

The death toll has soared to 246, Ecuador’s Vice President Jorge Glas said on Sunday evening on Ecuador TV. At least 2,527 people were injured, he said.

Ecuador President Rafael Correa rushed home from a trip to Italy to supervise the emergency. “The immediate priority is to rescue people in the rubble,” he said on Twitter.

“Everything can be rebuilt but lives cannot be recovered and that’s what hurts the most,” Correa told state radio.

“It was the worst experience of my life,” survivor Jose Meregildo was quoted by CNN about the tremors that violently shook his house in Guayaquil, 300 miles away from the quake’s epicenter. “Everybody in my neighbourhood was screaming saying it was going to be the end of the world.”

“I found my house like this,” Nely Intriago, standing in front of a pile of rubble, was quoted as saying, “What am I going to do? Cry, that’s what. Now we are on the street with nothing.”

The earthquake hit Saturday night, buckling overpasses, causing houses to collapse and knocking out power in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city, authorities said. People left their homes and wandered around, some sleeping in the streets.

In a race to help residents, Ecuador has deployed 10,000 soldiers and 4,600 police officers to the affected areas. The armed forces built mobile hospitals in Pedernales and Portoviejo and set up temporary shelters.

The quake comes on the heels of two deadly earthquakes across the Pacific, in the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands.