INTERNATIONAL: Hundreds Dead in Peru As Earthquake Strikes City
By Simon Webster
A powerful 8.0-magnitude earthquake has toppled buildings and set off landslides in coastal Peru, killing at least 450 people and injuring more than 1,500 others.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is in contact with the Peruvian government “and stands ready to support relief efforts with measures including the release of emergency funds and the deployment of a team of disaster assessment and coordination experts,” UN spokeswoman Michele Montas said.
The announcement came just after Peruvian President Alan Garcia Perez declared a state of emergency.
Dozens of bodies lay beneath bloodstained sheets at damaged hospitals as medics and rescuers struggled to help survivors of the quake.
Communications problems and huge cracks in the coastal Pan American Highway complicated efforts by emergency services.
The centre of the destruction was in Peru’s southern desert, in the oasis city of Ica and the nearby port of Pisco, about 125 miles south-east of the capital, Lima.
Pisco’s mayor said at least 200 people were buried in the rubble of a church where they had been attending a service.
Attendance at churches yesterday was high because August 15 is a Roman Catholic holy day celebrated as the occasion when the Virgin Mary passed into heaven.
In Ica, a city of 120,000 near the epicentre, a fourth of the buildings collapsed, and at least 57 bodies were brought to the morgue.
Injured parents and children crowded into a hospital where they waited for attention on cots.
Doctors called off their national strike to help treat the injured.
Deputy Health Minister Jose Calderon yesterday called the situation “dramatic” in Ica, a city of 650,000 people 165 miles south-east of the capital Lima.
He encouraged Peruvians to donate blood for the injured and said a convoy of doctors and nurses was headed to the Ica area.
Hundreds of people were crowding hospitals in the city seeking help even though the hospitals had suffered cracks and other structural damage.
Among the dead were 17 people killed when a church collapsed in Ica.
Another 70 people were injured in that incident.
At least 15 aftershocks followed, some as strong as magnitude- 6.3.
The US Geological Survey said the earthquake hit at 6.40pm local time on Wednesday about 90 miles south-east of Lima at a depth of about 25 miles. It initially reported a magnitude 7.9 quake but later revised the strength of the tremor.
Four strong aftershocks ranging from magnitudes of 5.4 to 5.9 were felt afterwards.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a tsunami warning for the coasts of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama. A tsunami watch was issued for the rest of Central America and Mexico and an advisory for Hawaii.
The centre cancelled all the alerts after about two hours, but it said the quake had caused an estimated 10-inch tsunami near the epicentre.
“It wasn’t big enough to be destructive,” said Stuart Weinstein, the centre’s assistant director.
The last time a quake of magnitude 7.0 or larger struck Peru was in September 2005 when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake rocked Peru’s northern jungle, killing four people. In 2001, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck near the southern Andean city of Arequipa, killing 71 people.
At least 200 people were buried in the rubble of a church where they had been attending a service
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