Quake leads to looting in Peru

PISCO, Peru (AP) — Earthquake survivors desperate for food and water ransacked a public market, while other mobs looted a refrigerated trailer and blocked aid trucks on the Pan-American Highway, prompting Peru’s president to appeal for calm yesterday.

Aid reached the disaster zone yesterday morning, bringing relief to a city that largely fended for itself for 36 hours, but hopes of finding more survivors have diminished.

At least 510 persons 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 carrying relief supplies. But food, water, tents and blankets were finally arriving, and with Peruvian soldiers distributing caskets, the first mass funerals were held.

“Nobody is going to die of hunger or thirst,” President Alan Garcia said after complaints that aid was not arriving fast enough for thousands who lost loved ones, homes and belongings in Wednesday’s magnitude-8 temblor and the many aftershocks that 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,” Mr. Garcia said. “There is no reason to fall into exaggerated desperation, knowing that the state is present.”

Electricity, water and phone service were down in much of southern Peru. Mr. Garcia predicted “a situation approaching normality” in 10 days, but acknowledged that rebuilding would take far longer. That was obvious to everyone in the gritty port city of Pisco, where officials said 85 percent of its downtown was destroyed.

Pisco’s center was a collection of rubble piles abbreviated by half-collapsed hulks. Even the structures still standing aren’t habitable. In streets littered with downed power and telephone lines, people in blankets huddled around fires.

Peru’s fire department said the death toll rose to 510. Destruction was centered in Peru’s southern desert, in the oasis city of Ica, in nearby Pisco, about 125 miles southeast of the capital of Lima.

Also damaged was the town of Chincha, where a prison wall fell down and at least 570 prisoners escaped. Only 29 were recaptured, a top prisons official said.

Searchers were still seeking bodies and survivors at the San Clemente Church on Pisco’s main square, where hundreds gathered on the day Roman Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary’s rise into heaven for a memorial Mass for a man who died a month earlier.

Minutes before the service was to end, the church’s domed ceiling began to break apart. The shaking lasted for an agonizing two minutes, burying 200 people, according to the town’s mayor.

International help includes cash from the United States, United Nations, Red Cross and European Union, as well as tents, water, medicine and other supplies.

The U.S. government released $150,000 in emergency funds for emergency supplies and was sending in medical teams — one was already in Peru for a training mission. 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, will not make the three-day trip to Pisco because both governments decided it is not needed.