0 nbc s wendy joins us from there. it s good to talk to you again. what are you hearing from folks in these ongoing efforts to rescue as many people as possible? yasmin, good afternoon to you. good to speak to you again. it s incredible, the outpouring of help and support that you are hearing, and seeing people come out in the downtown area. wherever you look there seems to be destruction, and everywhere you turn there seems to be a story, and people sometimes think we are exaggerating that thing, but i m not kidding you, you can walk one block and find a store yeah then walk another block and find somebody who has drove here, and we just spoke to somebody who drove from nashville that happened upon a law firm that was decimated by the storm, and started moving things and cutting out wires, and it was incredible. you ask them why they are doing it? the community needed help. then we have another wife and husband, and that was his law firm completely destroyed in the storm and all the
rubble of a building just yesterday. elsewhere in mexico city, a much more grim scene is emerging. teams, wog through the night to free a young girl trapped beneath the school. 21 children and four adults killed when the building caved in during the middle of classes tuesday afternoon. joining us live from mexico city, nbc news steve patterson. bring us up-to-date for the search of that young girl and other students that may be trapped in that building. we re now approaching 48 hours. it s a critical window for rescue workers to try and save anyone inside. this is the back edge of that window. in fact, really culturally the epicenter of the nation s focus. this school in particular. you mentioned 21 young students killed in the collapse. show you back to the scene now and show you where the focus is. this is it. we re right in the heart of this thing. see crew members going back and forth and carrying debris out by
them, and we need to make sure that their housing is good enough for them to live in. so it s housing, housing, housing. reducing the number of people, for example, in our shelters and that number has dramatically gone down and this major shelter in downtown, georgia brown. at its peak, it was at 10,000. now it s down to 1,400. and the other point this week, which is a high priority, is debris removal, and every community and every part of this city was touched by this storm and so people are now putting that debris out. and what i said to the president, we need to get that debris removed like yesterday. otherwise, we ll have a public safety hazard. the city crew started on thursday removing that degree, but we need advanced funding and the president was amenable to that, and in fact, he issued a statement that it would be 90% reimbursable in that category. so housing, housing, housing for this week, debris removal this week, and then saying to our businesses and others, let s get goin
many of them are renters. we need to make sure we give them the assistance that they need in order to stabilize their lives and get them back on their feet. housing is going to be critically important. people can t stay in shelters forever if they don t have places to go. we have to provide housing accommodations and they need to get that information and that assistance like right now. because you can only keep people in shelters for so long. now they re asking, mayor, what is the next step. debris removal. that is a critical component. people are putting their debris out right now and it is going to be massive. every community in the city of houston quite frankly in the whole region. when the sun is out, things dry out, people returning to the homes, they re putting all of that debris out. you can t leave it out there. that will create a public health hazard. the we don t need a
that has gone up, but this process is extremely slow. it is guys with buckets taking the debris, and tossing it out to the lot adjacent to the building and then taking the big es ka vators in there and bailing the debris out. if you zoom back out, you will realize that we are only in one phase of this. and this is the recovery phase, and then you have to notify the families and identify and find the bodies and start the investigation phase. the atf is working side by side with the agencies, but they don t get in there to do the real work they need to do until the recovery phase is wrapped up. we have a long way to gone this, richard. a long way to go. and what are the families being told? right now sh, it is really tough. the major and parts of the police department have been meeting periodically with the families. they have been directed to the hotline that has been established here. but basically they said, look, the if your family member is missing, it is going to take some time