Posted on 08/16/2007 6:12:48 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
PISCO, Peru - The death toll rose to 450 on Thursday in the magnitude-8 earthquake that devastated cities of adobe and brick in Peru's southern desert. Survivors wearing blankets walked like ghosts through the ruins.
Dust-covered dead were pulled out and laid in rows in the streets, or beneath bloodstained sheets at damaged hospitals and morgues. Doctors struggled to help more than 1,500 injured, including hundreds who waited on cots in the open air, fearing more aftershocks would send the structures crashing down.
Destruction was centered in Peru's southern desert, at the oasis city of Ica and the nearby port of Pisco, about 125 miles southeast of the capital, Lima.
The United Nations said the death toll was expected to rise beyond the 450 reported by Peru.
"It is quite likely that the numbers will continue to go up since the destruction of the houses in this area is quite total," said U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Margareta Wahlstrom.
The San Clemente church in the main plaza of the gritty fishing port of Pisco was perhaps the single deadliest spot in the magnitude-8 earthquake, which devastated cities and hamlets of adobe and brick across Peru's southern desert.
Hundreds had gathered inside San Clemente church for a service when the soaring ceiling began to break apart. Worshipers were caught in their pews.
The shaking lasted for an agonizing two minutes, burying at least 200 people, according to the town's mayor. On Thursday, only two stone columns rose from a giant pile of stone, bricks, wood and dust.
Rescuers pulled out bodies all day and lined them up on the plaza — at least 60 by late afternoon. Civil defense workers then arrived and zipped them into body bags. But relatives searching desperately for the missing opened the zippers, crying hysterically 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?"
"The dead are scattered by the dozens on the streets," Pisco Mayor Juan Mendoza told Lima radio station CPN, sobbing. "We don't have lights, water, communications. Most houses have fallen. Churches, stores, hotels — everything is destroyed."
The earthquake's magnitude was raised from 7.9 to 8 on Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey. At least 14 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater followed. The tremors 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. He said flights were reaching Ica to take in aid and take out the injured. 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, where so many buildings fell that streets were covered with small mountains of adobe bricks and broken furniture.
The 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. Navy hospital ship Comfort, equipped with a staff of 800 and 12 operating rooms, is in Ecuador and could quickly sail to Peru if asked, U.S. officials said.
In Washington, President Bush offered condolences and said the administration was studying how best to send help. One American died in the quake, according to the State Department.
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. Large boulders also blocked Peru's Central Highway to the Andes mountains.
Many people said they had seen "lights in the sky," a phenomenon authorities attributed to short circuits at electrical plants where the quake damaged cables and other equipment.
In Chincha, a small town near Pisco only 25 miles from the quake's epicenter, an AP Television News cameraman counted 30 bodies in 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, kept outside for fear that aftershocks could topple the cracked walls.
"Our services are saturated and half of the hospital has collapsed," Dr. Huber Malma said as he single-handedly attended to dozens of patients.
The quake toppled a wall in Chincha's prison, allowing at least 600 prisoners to flee. Only 29 had been recaptured, national prisons official Manuel Aguilar said.
Overstretched police and rescue workers in orange uniforms sought to help survivors trying to get some sleep in the streets amid collapsed adobe homes.
"We're all frightened to return to our houses," Maria Cortez said, staring vacantly at the half of her house that was still standing.
The Peruvian Red Cross arrived in Ica and Pisco 7 1/2 hours after the quake, about three times as long as it would normally have taken because of road damage, Red Cross official Giorgio Ferrario said.
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.
"The earth moved differently this time. It made waves and the earth was like jelly," said Antony Falconi, 27, trying to find a bus to take him home.
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," said USGS geophysicist Paul Earle.
Wednesday's quake caused a tsunami as well, but scientists expected surges of no more than 1.6 feet in faraway Japan.
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 (7.5 cms) a year, Earle said.
The last time a quake of magnitude 7.0 or larger struck Peru was in September 2005, when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake rocked the country's northern jungle, killing four people. In 2001, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck near the southern Andean city of Arequipa, killing 71.
___
Associated Press writers Monte Hayes, Edison Lopez and Leslie Josephs in Lima, Martin Mejia and Mauricio Munoz in Ica, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Sarah DiLorenzo in New York contributed to this report.
Lights in the sky before EQs.
I have been researching prospective novels on two major earth phenomena—the great New Madrid quakes of 1811-12, and the Mt Pelee eruption and Caribbean Plate disturbances of 1902 that killed around 40,000 people. Little noted in recent almanacs is that the New Madrid disturbances also were reflected in a major quake in Venezuela that killed around 20,000 people.
The upshot of all this research is a tentative conclusion that periodically, perhaps at 90 to 100 year intervals the earth experiences several decades of disturbances and then settles down for a few decades after which there is another smaller episode of disturbances, followed by a shorter quiet phase, and then the next 90-100 year sequence. This is for the past several hundred years. I have not yet carried this research back further, but probably will at some point.
Here are the major points I am proposing.
1) 1800s. Starting in 1783, the Laki Fissure event in Iceland and culminating in the 1811-12 events best known by the US New Madrid events, and the great Tambora volcano in 1815.
2) 1900s. Starting with the great Krakatoa eruption in 1883, including the Charleston EQ in 1886, the terrible Caribbean Plate events of 1902, the San Francisco EQ of 1906, and culminating in the great Katmai/Novarupta explosion in Alaska in 1912.
3) 2000s. Starting with Mt. St. Helens in 1980, Pinatubo in 1991, several VEI 5 volcanoes in North and South America in that period, the major EQs in Mexico, Turkey, Pakistan and the terrible EQ tsunami Christmas 2005, and now a big one in Chile.
Unfortunately, I do not think this cycle is finished, so perhaps we will have a very major volcano before long of the magnitude of Tambora or Katmai. I wonder if major earthquakes start magma moving toward the surface? If so, then Indonesia or South America would be good candidates. If I lived in California or Alaska, I would have a good family emergency EQ plan in place.
Apocalypse soon?
San Berdoo Sun dotcom | 08/11/2007 12:19:22 AM PDT
Posted on 08/17/2007 12:39:09 AM EDT by BenLurkin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1882399/posts
Lights in the sky. I got so carried away with my post that I forgot to add in the lights in the sky material which I found in the book “The Big One” by Jake Page and Charles Officer, 2004, about the 1811-12 New Madrid quakes.
The first major quake (8.2 est.) occurred Dec. 16, 1811. Page 34, “William Leigh Pierce, on his way from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, wrote that on the last day of Nov. 1811, just before sunrise, ‘two vast electrical columns shot up from the eastern horizon, until their heads reached the zenith.’ They lit up the sky and came and went in an instant, and thereafter until Dec. 16, the air was never transparent but instead quite opaque. When the sun was visible, ‘it exhibited a dull and fiery redness.’”
Page 50-51, John Haywood, who published “The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee” in 1823 wrote “’The motions in Tennessee were sometimes, but seldom, perpendicular; resembling a house raised, and suddenly let fall to the ground. Explosions like the discharge of a connon at a few miles’ distance were heard; and at night, flashes of lightning seemed sometimes to break from the earth. For two or three months the shocks were frequent; almost every day. Then they gradually decreased in frequency and took place at longer intervals, which continued to lengthen till they finally ceased. In May 1817, in Tennessee, they had come to be several months apart and were but just perceptible. The last of them was in 1822.’”
Page 167, “Yet another potential precursor [for potential EQ predictions] came (literally) to light in the early years of this century. Stories abounded of strange light effects preceding EQs. The philosopher Immanuel Kant noted that the Lisbon quake of 1755 was preceded by violent lightning....Floating balls of light were filmed and shown on Turkish TV the night before the devestating EQ that hit the city of Izmit in Turkey. While light effects are generally considered real phenomena associated with at least some quakes, no one had much of an idea what could cause them. But in 2002 Friedemann Freund, a physicist at San Jose State U in Calif., published a theory that he hopes explains not just the light effects but also a NASA finding from satellite surveillance that found infrared effects in the region near the time of EQs. Freund suggests that because of immense pressure before a quake, rock will deform, breaking chemical bonds and electric charges when protons are emitted. These collect, Freund believes, on the surface and create a sufficiently large electric field to ionize the air, causing light resembling a miniature aurora borealis, as well as heat.”
People living in earthquake and hurricane zones should seriously study the merits of straw bale constructed buildings. There are many sources if you Googel “straw bale building construction”.
Last year I visited a one bedroom straw bale house behind Pensacola, FL that had survived Hurricane Ivan with NO damage, while 1 foot diameter trees were falling 100 yards away. Even after two years, neighboring houses showed signs of damage and unfinished repairs.
Being dense, massive and flexible, straw bale construction has shown resistance to hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires.
Thank you for this really great link with people who are promoting straw bale construction for the 2005 hurricane victims. It has a lot of valuable and interesting information.
Interesting. Lightning is sometimes observed when volcanoes erupt.
Thanks for the link. For some reason the news networks and the media news don’t seem to be covering this disaster.
Any ideas why not?
My husband was just remarking how San Francisco and Los Angeles have been unusually quiet for the last decade....
So, Australia is reporting this quake. Why is the U.S. news so quiet on this major quake?
Thanks for the link. Reuters was emphasizing social disorder and people fighting with each other rather than cooperating to survive.
That’s not encouraging.
BTTT
As of yesterday (Friday) there were reports on all the major networks and the BBC with photos, in the mid-Atlantic news area. They also reported that the Peruvian Embassy in DC was overloaded with calls. Several local restaurants owned by Peruvians were reported to be engaging in support activities.
NewsNow has very good coverage. Thank you for the link. I’ll use it for updates now.
The U.S. coincidentally had a medical team in Peru at the time of the quake and is sending another.
But they are overwhelmed there.
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