Brave residents in Mexico City, banded together to rescue several schoolchildren after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake rocked Mexico, killing hundreds of people.
Video footage of the harrowing rescue showed a group of men digging through rubble at the toppled Enrique Rebsamen School after noticing the children in a hole.
The men are shown, in the Facebook video, pulling a large block of concrete from in front of a gated hole as another appears to motion to the children inside.
Soon, a young girl emerges and is pulled from behind the concrete as other children are heard crying. The camera soon goes out of focus as the men free the other kids.
Grieving parents have been searching for their little ones since the earthquake shook the city on Tuesday, causing the school to fold in on itself.
In the wake of the devastation, rescuers found the bodies of 21 young children and four adults, CNN reports. And dozens more children remain missing.
By Wednesday, the death toll had risen to 225, the Associated Press reports.
Shocking images and videos from the destruction reveal the extent of the damage from the violent quake with buildings reduced to rubble, others on fire and thousands of people flooding the streets after fleeing their homes. A majority of the casualties have been reported in Puebla, Morelos and Mexico states, and Mexico City.
Pedro Serrano, a doctor who helped with the rescue efforts, recalled finding several people dead in the school.
“We managed to get into a collapsed classroom. We saw some chairs and wooden tables,” Serrano, 29, told the AP. “The next thing we saw was a leg and then we started to move rubble and we found a girl and two adults — a woman and a man.”
Rescue teams left the bodies there, with no way to pull them out.
Haunting images from the 7.1 earthquake that rocked Mexico City
In a Wednesday Twitter post, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto wrote in Spanish: “The priority is still to rescue people in collapsed structures and care for the wounded. Every minute counts to save lives.”
The Associated Press reported that dozens of buildings toppled into mounds of rubble, with at least 44 buildings falling apart in Mexico City alone.
The earthquake comes 32 years to the day after Mexico was hit with one of the deadliest earthquakes in it’s history in 1985, which killed thousands. The country was hit with another powerful earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.1, less than two weeks ago in southern west Mexico, near Acapulco.