Since before dawn, the rescue workers had tunneled through the rubble of the collapsed building to reach the trapped victim they had come to know as Mugubi, the name he had meekly shouted up to them.
A nervous anticipation ran through the gathered crowd as word spread that Kenyan soldiers and volunteers had raised the man 20 feet through an opening and toward freedom. Then, suddenly, all their hopes were dashed.
“Send up a stethoscope!” Steven Karau, an army doctor in green fluorescent jacket, urgently shouted down from his perch atop the pancaked concrete floors.
It was too late. Ten feet from the surface, the man’s heart failed and he died, once again plunging the morale of the hundreds of rescue workers who dashed to the site of Friday’s terrorist bomb attack against the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.
For the second straight day, the urgent efforts to search out survivors in the devastated office block next to the gutted embassy were a chaotic, emotional struggle where the anticipation of imminent rescue repeatedly dissolved into frustrated failure, only to have hopes raised once again.
In the afternoon, the rescue operation received a jolt of adrenaline when nearly 200 Israeli army rescue personnel arrived to help. After nightfall, they lifted one survivor to safety after he had been buried more than 36 hours in the rubble, and then they turned their attention to a woman who had been heard speaking deeper in the debris.
“There was a collective sign of relief that swept across the site when he was pulled out,” said Nina Galbe, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “He had a deep slash so you could see the skull on his forehead, and he couldn’t talk. But he’ll survive for sure.”
Earlier, the Israelis had pulled the ninth body of the day from the rubble.
“This is very discouraging for the workers,” said one Western rescue official after the death of the man known as Mugubi. “Minutes before he is supposed to be rescued, he dies. But what can the workers do? They need more sophisticated equipment.”
For more than 30 hours, Kenyan rescue teams had struggled with picks, axes and bare hands to remove debris, stopping at intervals to silence a crowd of onlookers so they could listen for voices. They had stopped using cranes to remove large concrete chunks out of fear of causing cave-ins that would further threaten the buried victims.
After each death, the rescuers regrouped and refocused on the next victim discovered alive. The two targeted Saturday night were a man who told workers his name was Nganga and a woman deeper in the rubble whom only he could hear. Earlier, rescuers took the man’s phone number so they could alert his relatives as they continued to dig toward him.
The challenge of digging out the victims has been matched by the struggle of Kenya’s hospitals to treat the wounded. Many of Nairobi’s medical facilities were overwhelmed, with 200 people still waiting for treatment at the city’s main Kenyatta Hospital on Saturday. Officials appealed for donations of blood, needles and syringes.
U.S. officials also came under fire from some Kenyans for not doing enough to help. Some Kenyans bristled when armed U.S. Marines chased rescue workers away from the embassy next to the ruins of a collapsed building where the search for bodies was continuing.
U.S. Ambassador Prudence Bushnell said U.S. help would soon arrive with a half-dozen separate teams of experts headed toward the region. They included a 33-member medical assessment team, 19 medical evacuation workers, 21 military experts, 50 U.S. Marines, a mortuary team and a search-and-rescue squad from Virginia. In addition, some 60 FBI experts who will begin an investigation into the bombing.
For the rescue workers, help arrived at about 4 p.m. Saturday when several teams of yellow-helmeted Israeli soldiers, bringing with them long, grim experience in anti-terrorism and post-terrorism relief, marched onto the blast site and immediately took control of the operation.
With 170 men, body-sniffing dogs and two tons of special equipment, such as long-reach listening microphones, the Israelis cleared the site of debris and unnecessary onlookers and brought the cranes back in to begin digging anew from atop the pile of rubble.
“It’s dangerous to go downstairs to upstairs, so we go upstairs down,” said Col. Isaac Ashkenazi, a surgeon with the team. “We’re happy to help.”
According to the Israelis, their dogs immediately found six and maybe seven bodies in the U.S. Embassy and five bodies in the flattened offices next door. One commander quickly got in touch with the buried Nganga, who was later pulled to safety.
The Israelis vowed to work through the night to release the woman buried even further beneath him, and many of the Kenyan workers said they were content to sit back and learn.
“I’ve seen train wrecks, bad vehicle accidents, a ferry turned over in Mombasa and bodies being retrieved from the sea,” said Edwin Suleiman, a Kenyan Red Cross worker for 21 years. “But nothing of this magnitude.”
