LIMA, Peru, Aug. 17, 2007
Death Toll In Peru Quake Tops 500
Dozens Of Aftershocks Follow Magnitude 8 Earthquake; More Than 1,500 Injured
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Play CBS Video Video U.S. Woman Recounts Peru Quake Electra Anderson of California recounts the horror of the 8.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated coastal cities south of Lima in Peru.
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Video Grim Aftermath In Peru At least 450 people are dead after a massive earthquake hit Peru, and the death toll is expected to go much higher. Bianca Solorzano reports on the aftermath and the scare that still lingers.
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Video Peru Quake Displaces Thousands The death toll in Peru is rising as bodies continue to be recovered from the rubble. Food and water are also in high demand as survivors deal with their loss. Bianca Solorzano reports.
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A man cleans the debris at a house destroyed by an earthquake in Ica, southern Peru, Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)
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Thousands fled into the streets and parks of Lima, Peru, fearing aftershocks from the quake that hit on Aug. 15, 2007. Above: people camped out in the park use cell phones to check on loved ones. (AP/Karel Navarro)
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A mototaxi drives past a car covered with rubble in an area hit by an earthquake in Ica, Peru, Aug. 16, 2007. (AP)
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Checking for damage in Lima, Peru, after a earthquake on Aug. 15, 2007. (AP/AgenciaAndina/H.Vinces)
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The earthquake that hit Peru Wednesday night touched off the fire seen here in Lima, Aug. 15, 2007. (AP/Agencia Andina/H. Vinces)
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Photo Essay Quake Shakes Peru Powerful earthquake kills more than 500 people
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Interactive Ground Shakers Learn about what triggers an earthquake and get details on some of the world's worst.
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Fast Facts Peru Learn about the people, economy and history.
A boy in the back of his night-school English class. A girl selling sweets outside a bank. A young woman studying dance. All were crushed when buildings made of unreinforced adobe and brick collapsed during the earth's interminable two minutes of heaving.
About 15 guests and workers couldn't get out as the five-story Embassy Hotel accordioned onto its ground floor Wednesday evening. A billiard hall buried as many as 20 people.
Manuel Medina said Friday that he had dug the body of his 12-year-old nephew, Miguel Blondet Soto, and a dozen other children from their English classroom at the San Tomas school. "Those who were in front managed to get out, but those in the back died," he said.
Soaring church ceilings tumbled onto the faithful in towns all around this gritty port city, covering pews in tons of stone, timbers and dust.
"People were running out the front door screaming," said Renzo Hernandez, who watched from the other side of Pisco's main plaza as the San Clemente church disintegrated. The survivors, bloodied and covered in dust, hugged one another in terror and relief, he said. "It felt like the end of the world."
Hope is dwindling that any survivors will be found in the rubble of the San Clemente Church — hundreds were inside Wednesday when the quake hit and the building collapsed around them. The priest is the only known survivor.
Peru's fire department said the death toll from the magnitude-8 quake that devastated the southern coast had risen to 510, and at least 1,500 people suffered injuries.
Rescuers are still digging through ruins of collapsed adobe homes in cities and hamlets.
CBS News correspondent Bianca Solorzano reports that for some it's just too much to bear — too hard to see loved one pulled from rubble and taken away. And towns that were already poor now have barely anything left. Pisco was hardest hit — at least 85 percent of its buildings lay in ruin.
Two days after the devastation relief from around the world is arriving, but getting it where it's most needed is difficult.
Jacob Goad arrived in Peru from North Carolina to help. He spent the night in the street next to the church talking with families that are now homeless.
"The feeling of loss when somebody sees their relative being brought out of the rubble behind us is ... it's surreal," Goad told Solorzano.
Amid the chaos, basic needs like food and water are barely being met. There are also thousands of injured.
Dr. Jose Veira says there's no way to know exactly how many are hurt because so many people are unaccounted for.
The death toll is expected to rise.
Police identified bodies and civil defense teams ferried in food. Housing officials assessed the need for new homes, and in several towns long lines formed under an intense sun to collect water from soldiers. In the capital of Lima, Peruvians donated tons of food, water, clothing and other supplies.
Desperation, however, was growing across Peru's desert southern coast. Hungry survivors ransacked a public market, and mobs looted a refrigerated trailer and robbed a school. Crowds stopped aid trucks along the Pan-American Highway. Price-gouging bus drivers charged people rushing here from Lima three times the normal fare.
"Why do we abuse one another so much? That's what hurts," said Manrique Monsalve, whose niece Marcia died when a bank's wall tumbled onto her at Pisco's central plaza.
President Alan Garcia, on the scene in Pisco for the second straight day, appealed for calm and vowed that no one would die of hunger or thirst.
"I understand your desperation, your anxiety," he said. "There is no reason to fall into exaggerated desperation."
Hundreds had gathered in the pews of the San Clemente church on Wednesday — the day Roman Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary's rise into heaven — for a special Mass marking one month since the death of a Pisco man.
With minutes left in the Mass, the church's ceiling began to break apart. The shaking lasted for an agonizing two minutes, burying 200 people, according to the town's mayor. On Thursday, only two stone columns and the church's dome rose from a giant pile of stone, bricks, wood and dust.Learn about what triggers an earthquake and get details on some of the world's worst.
Rescuers laid out the dust-covered dead beneath bloodstained sheets in the city's plaza. Civil defense workers then arrived and zipped them into body bags. But relatives searching desperately for the missing unzipped the bags, sobbing each time they recognized a familiar face.
Few in the traumatized crowds would talk with journalists. One man shouted at the bodies of his wife and two small daughters as they were pulled from the rubble: "Why did you go? Why?"
Pisco Mayor Juan Mendoza told Lima radio station CPN, sobbing: "The dead are scattered by the dozens on the streets. We don't have lights, water, communications. Most houses have fallen. Churches, stores, hotels — everything is destroyed."
As dusk fell, Health Minister Carlos Vallejos said finding survivors seemed increasingly unlikely.
(AP Photo/Martin Mejia)
Felipe Gutierrez, 82, sat in his pajamas — his only clothing — in front of what was his Pisco home. The quake reduced it to rubble and he, his 74-year-old wife, their two children and three grandchildren sat staring at the ruins, a tangle of adobe, straw and all of their belongings.
"Yesterday we slept on a mattress, and now we'll have to set up a tent, because we have nowhere to live," he said.
The deputy chief of Peru's fire department, Roberto Ognio, presented a report late Thursday saying the death toll from the quake had risen to 510. The previous total had been 450 and he did not say where the additional deaths had occurred.
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
i''d rather be dead than to live in this perverted freakish land of the daring grindets and the home of the shock and awe swingones
if i have to break all the bones in my body and put them all back for se x and pleasure just one more time cause some hikenswim nerfbus bump car camp n nap somebody feels like get''n frisky,
i swear find a cure for the common life
'' ... why go to war to save the world from folk that invest money and votes in non-charity and taxation at gunpoint? ... ''
In Norse mythology, earthquakes were explained as the violent struggling of the god Loki. When Loki, god of mischief and strife, murdered Baldr, god of beauty and light, he was punished by being bound in a cave with a poisonous serpent placed above his head dripping venom. Loki''s wife Sigyn stood by him with a bowl to catch the poison, but whenever she had to empty the bowl the poison would drip on Loki''s face, forcing him to jerk his head away and thrash against his bonds, causing the earth to tremble.
In Greek mythology, Poseidon was the god of earthquakes.
In Christian mythology, certain saints were invoked as patrons against earthquakes, including Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus, Saint Agatha, Saint Francis Borgia, and Saint Emygdius."
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake#Earthquakes_in_mythology_and_religion
The historian Herodotus laughed at that idea, suggesting that they had natural causes, which modern science has confirmed.
- Posted by shanev137 at 02:15 AM : Aug 17, 2007
There have always been earthquakes.
Sometimes they seem to happen in clusters.
Ancient societies like Crete have been disrupted by them. That''s how the legend of Atlantis got started.
Posted by shanev137 at 02:15 AM : Aug 17, 2007
It''s that global warming caused by Bush and Rove and the military industrial complex! See whose laughing now - you neorepurgicons!!!!!
Posted by shanev137 at 02:15 AM : Aug 17, 2007
Yep Mother natures shock and awe, what about our State on the west coast..........all the wild fires, drought, no bees...sad and dangerous
+ report abuse
****
and you are blaming an entity that you dont believe in? let me guess, can I guess when you lost faith...
they day you prayed for a million dollars and God did not answer your prayers
Murderer, feel free to worship this murderer or learn the truth;
god doesnt bless people, the lord doesnt help people, and prayers dont work.
www.zeitgeistmovie.com
www.atheists.org
www.evilbible.com
More info from USGS
Seven point nine is HUGE
I wish the best of luck to the people of Peru
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Now that we have the internet it feels like so many of these natural disasters like the tsunami and this earthquake are happening right around the corner . . . so frustrating to see other people suffer . . .
- by red164 August 16, 2007 5:33 PM EDT
- With all the spying technology the BUSH Admin has you would''ve thought the medias info on this Killer Quake would be more accurate immediately after it hit.
- Reply to this comment
See all 17 CommentsThe early reports were claiming that it caused minor damage and a few deaths.