"Her belly was in shreds and full of blood"

José Manuel Lorca and his son held on to a doorframe for dear life as the earth shook under their feet in the neighborhood of La Viña. When the tremors ended, they went outside. Just 50 meters to the right, there was a building in ruins on Calle Infante Don Juan Manuel.

"We could hear children screaming, so I didn't think twice about it and ran to look for them," says Lorca. He and another four residents of the area organized themselves into a makeshift rescue team, creating a human chain to remove the rubble from the source of the sounds.

It was a dismal sight. A woman's head was sticking out of the debris. "It took us around 15 minutes to pull her out, although the truth is, it was such an intense moment that I don't exactly recall how much time went by, it might have taken us a lot longer than that," says Lorca, adding that they soon realized they could do nothing for the woman (whose name was Antonia Sánchez Gallego).

"She died instantly for sure, because when we managed to pull her out, her belly was in shreds and full of blood. Since there was nothing more we could do, we were thinking of moving on to help other people, but we quickly realized that the children were right underneath her. They were screaming nonstop."

So the small team kept working, and soon they found the first child, aged around three.

"He was conscious and crying; he had a large cut on his head and cuts on his feet, but he was all right," Lorca recalls. A bit below him, there was a second child who had sustained nothing more than a bump to the head. By then, two ambulances had reached the site.

"We yelled out in joy when we found them. It's not every day that you save two little kids from a certain death."