From Deseret News archives:
Survivors of deadly Peru quake seek relief, as strong aftershocks shake the region
Survivors of Wednesday's magnitude-8 quake lined up under a beating sun in Pisco's central plaza to receive bottled water unloaded from trucks by soldiers.
Brig. Maj. Jorge Vera, chief of the rescue operation, said 85 percent of downtown Pisco was destroyed in the quake, which killed at least 510 people and sent a church's soaring ceiling tumbling down on hundreds of worshippers. The center of the city was choked with traffic, including relief vehicles.
"The biggest problem is that Pisco practically no longer exists. Everything is destroyed. It has practically been razed," Julio Franco, chief of operations in Pisco for a Spain-based NGO called Firefighters without Borders, told Cadena Ser radio.
The relief effort showed signs of organization by mid-morning, with the military clearing rubble, police identifying corpses and civil defense teams ferrying food. Housing ministry officials started to assess who will need new homes.
At least two aftershocks, including a magnitude-5.9 quake, rattled the area on Friday.
"In 10 days, we'll have a situation approaching normality," said Garcia, though he acknowledged that rebuilding the hard-hit southern coastal region would take far longer.
In the cemetery, a man painted the names of the dead in black on headstones. Some 200 headstones were lined up, along with more than 30 coffins. Burial vaults collapsed in the quake, and crosses tumbled over.
On Thursday, distraught relatives wept as they searched grim rows of body bags for loved ones killed when the church ceiling came down.
Peru's fire department said late Thursday the death toll from the quake had risen to 510, and rescuers were still digging through rubble from collapsed adobe homes in cities and hamlets.
Destruction was centered in Peru's southern desert, the oasis city of Ica and nearby Pisco, about 125 miles southeast of the capital of Lima.
Searchers at Pisco's San Clemente church pulled out at least 60 bodies by late Thursday. More than 1,500 were injured in the quake-hit region.
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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