Death Toll In Peru Quake Tops 500

The distance between life and death in Peru's magnitude-8 earthquake was the number of steps to open ground. Many of the 510 people who died weren't close enough.

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.

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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.

The earthquake's magnitude was raised from 7.9 to 8 on Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey. Dozens of aftershocks — including at least five on Friday — caused renewed anxiety, though there were no reports of additional damage or injuries.

President Alan Garcia flew by helicopter to Ica, a city of 120,000 where a quarter of the buildings collapsed, and declared a state of emergency.

Government doctors called off their national strike for higher pay to handle the emergency.

"There has been a good international response even without Peru asking for it, and they've been very generous," Garcia said during a stop in Pisco.

Promises of help are coming in from around the world, adds Solorzano. The Red Cross is vowing to send planes full of supplies, and the United Nations is pledging almost $1 million in aid.

In Washington, President Bush offered condolences and said his administration was studying how best to send help. One American died in the quake, according to the State Department.

The U.S. government released $150,000 in cash to pay for emergency supplies and dispatched medical teams — one of which was already on the ground. It also sent two mobile clinics and loaned two helicopters to Peruvian authorities.

But the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort, now docked in Ecuador, won't make the three-day trip to Pisco because both governments decided it wasn't needed. The Comfort carries 800 medical personnel, but Peru needs supplies more than doctors, U.S. Embassy spokesman Dan Martinez said.

Electricity, water and phone service were down in much of southern Peru. The government rushed police, soldiers and doctors to the area, but traffic was paralyzed by giant cracks and fallen power lines on the Panamerican Highway.

In Chincha, a small town near Pisco only 25 miles from the quake's epicenter, an AP Television News cameraman counted 30 bodies on a hospital patio. The face of one victim was uncovered, her eyes open. The feet of another stuck out from under a blanket.

Hundreds of injured lay side-by-side on cots on walkways and in gardens outside hospital buildings.

"Our services are saturated and half of the hospital has collapsed," Dr. Huber Malma said as he single-handedly attended to dozens of patients.

In Lima, 95 miles from the epicenter, only one death was recorded. But the furious two minutes of shaking prompted thousands to flee into the streets and sleep in public parks.

Scientists said the quake was a "megathrust" — a type of earthquake similar to the catastrophic Indian Ocean temblor in 2004 that generated deadly tsunami waves. "Megathrusts produce the largest earthquakes on the planet," USGS geophysicist Paul Earle said.

In general, magnitude 8 quakes are capable of causing tremendous damage. Quakes of magnitude 2.5 to 3 are the smallest generally felt, and every increase of one number on the magnitude scale means that the quake's magnitude is 10 times as great.

The temblor occurred in one of the most seismically active regions in the world at the boundary where the Nazca and South American tectonic plates meet. The plates are moving together at a rate of 3 inches a year, Earle said.

Associated Press writers Frank Bajak, Jeanneth Valdivieso in Pisco and Monte Hayes in Lima contributed to this report.