Only parts of mud-covered roofs showed where houses had once stood, while other homes had disappeared altogether.
Residents scrabbled at the earth with tools and their bare hands in a frantic attempt to uncover their relatives.
Only parts of mud-covered roofs showed where houses had once stood, while other homes had disappeared altogether.
"I have never felt so useless, and so sad, to see dozens of children, teenagers and old people digging with their hands through the mud... looking for their father, mother, brother or sister," said a photographer at the scene.
By Sunday morning, only three people were dug out alive. One of them, a young servant girl was pinned under concrete blocks.
"She's calm, but she said she can't feel her legs," a rescue worker said, after comforting the girl at the bottom of a narrow hole that had been dug into the mud.
Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, a man was digging continuously - even though he was not certain where his crushed home was located.
"I can't leave, I can't stop... My brother is down there," the man said.
Another man, Reynaldo Maradiaga, described how he started to run when the earthquake began rocking his home.
"I heard a big roar, and I saw the mountain come tumbling down over the houses," he said.
Country-wide devastation
The damage seems to have been concentrated in certain areas, while others have been virtually unaffected.
Television pictures showed collapsed houses and wrecked roads all over the country. Children could be seen wandering through collapsed shantytowns.
A bus on its usual run between Zacatecoluca and San Salvador was split in half by falling rocks.
"I told the driver: 'Look, the stones are falling, stop'. We felt the tremor, and rocks fell," said one of the passengers on a local television station.
"When he saw that the bus was no longer moving he got out through the window and I got out from one further behind, then a lady and a boy... it's a miracle from God I escaped," she added.