Several Still Trapped After Church Roof Collapses During Mass in Mexico, Killing Ten Parishioners

Ten people were killed and 30 were believed trapped in rubble after a church roof collapsed onto parishioners during a Sunday Mass in northern Mexico, officials said. 

Forty people were taken to the hospital from Santa Cruz in Ciudad Madero, on the Gulf coast near the port of Ciudad Madero. At least three children were among the dead, according to reports. 

Military personnel and emergency workers strained under floodlights to locate survivors, aided by search dogs and earth movers. 

“We lament the painful loss of people who were there celebrating the baptism of their children,” Bishop José Armando Alvarez of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tampico said in a recorded message released on social media.

Local journalist Franc Contreras told the BBC World Service that emergency workers told him there was hope that some survivors would be found under the church’s wooden pews. 

“From underneath the rubble, thanks to Divine Providence and the work of the rescue teams, people have been pulled out alive!” Alvarez's diocese wrote in a statement. “Let's keep praying!”

"The church was packed with about 100 people, and people were lined up to take the communion, of course that's sort of the climax of the Catholic Mass, and that's when the roof came down on top of them—bricks, concrete, and of course steel support structures coming down on top of the people," Contreras said.  

Officials blamed “structural failure.”