The lot at the end of the road was full of bags of cement and piles of bricks.
Sacks of cement and piles of gravel, Turkish in origin and bought legally in Egypt, are smuggled through the hundreds of tunnels in double shifts, day and night, totaling some 3,000 tons a day.
The bunkers were made of cement bags, piled high, and he'd first seen them in November, after terrorists came by boat from Pakistan to kill a lot of people in another part of the city, a place that also seemed to be crammed with hotels.
A dozen volunteers form a bucket brigade to pass the cement from the mixing pile down a narrow path to Peralta's house.
About 5,400 emergency workers, firefighters, soldiers and volunteers, helped by 50 sniffer dogs, continued to sift through piles of cement, rock and twisted metal, many pointing out that the last survivor from the L'Aquila quake was found 72 hours after it struck.
For Mr. Burford and Mr. Cotter, being beer people means spending 60 to 70 hours a week in their brewery, which with its bits and pieces of third-hand furniture, its beer kegs stacked haphazardly on a wet cement floor and its piles of equipment with myriad hoses, valves and pipes, has all the charm of a gas station, though it does smell much better.
The pile of cement grew into what residents affectionately call a "rock outcropping".
What's more, Lourdes came to Florida as the mail-order bride of a Mr. Zimmer, who wound up buried in a pile of cement out by Hialeah.
Mr. Rivera, 49, didn't know it, but he was standing on a hotly contested pile of cement, sand and stray tires.
Many shoppers slept in their cars overnight to be among the first to browse through a 183,000-square-foot warehouse containing treasures like dusty airplane engines, old traffic lights, outdated computers, a pile of cement slabs and boxes brimming with expired camera film.
