PISCO, Peru, 18 August 2007 — Earthquake survivors desperate for food and water looted a public market yesterday, while other mobs looted a refrigerated trailer and blocked aid trucks on the Pan-American highway, prompting Peru’s president to appeal for calm. Aid finally arrived to the disaster zone after about 36 hours without much help. But hopes of finding more survivors diminished.
At least 510 people were killed in the quake and 1,500 were injured, overwhelming the few hospitals in Peru’s southern desert region, and severe damage to the only highway slowed trucks from Lima. But food, water, tents and blankets were finally arriving, and with Peruvian soldiers distributing aluminum caskets, the first mass funerals were being held.
“Nobody is going to die of hunger or thirst,” President Alan Garcia said following complaints that aid was not arriving fast enough for some 80,000 people who lost loved ones, homes and belongings in Wednesday’s magnitude-8 temblor and the many aftershocks that have followed.
“I understand your desperation, your anxiety and some are taking advantage of the circumstances to take the property of others, take things from stores, thinking they’re not going to receive help,” Garcia said. “There is no reason to fall into exaggerated desperation knowing that the state is present.”
Electricity, water and phone service remained down in much of southern Peru. Garcia predicted “a situation approaching normality” in 10 days, but acknowledged that reconstruction would take far longer. That was obvious to everyone in the gritty port city of Pisco, where Brig. Maj. Jorge Vera, chief of the rescue operation, said 85 percent of the downtown was destroyed, a collection of rubble piles and half-collapsed hulks.
The relief effort showed signs of organization by midmorning, with the military clearing rubble, police identifying corpses and civil defense teams ferrying food.
At least 18 aftershocks of magnitude-5 or greater have struck since the first quake, and Peru’s fire department said the death toll had risen to 510. Destruction was centered in Peru’s southern desert, in the oasis city of Ica and in nearby Pisco, about 200 km southeast of the capital. Also damaged was the town of Chincha, where a prison wall fell down, and at least 571 prisoners escaped. Only 29 were recaptured, a top prisons official said.
On Thursday, relatives searching for the missing unzipped the bags lined up in the plaza, crying hysterically each time they recognized a familiar face.
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?”
As dusk fell, Health Minister Carlos Vallejos said finding survivors seemed increasingly unlikely. “We keep losing hope of finding someone alive after 24 hours have passed” since the quake struck, Vallejos told The Associated Press outside of the church.
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.
