Those who survived quake were first to open ground

PISCO, Peru -- 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 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."

Two days after the quake, the relief effort was finally getting organized Friday. 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."

At least 542 prisoners remained on the run after escaping from a prison in the nearby town of Chincha when a wall crumbled during the quake. Only 29 had been recaptured, officials said.

Fishing boats were marooned in city streets in nearby San Andres, and an oceanside neighborhood of Pisco looked like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, with piles of rubble poking from water that rushed in during the tremor.

Two sunrises after the earthquake all but leveled this port city of 90,000 people, workers continued to pull bodies from fallen buildings, the region lacked water and electricity, and officials began to worry about the outbreak of disease.

The death count stood at 510, according to Peru's fire department, and hopes of finding more survivors diminished. At least 1,500 people suffered injuries and Garcia said 80,000 people had lost loved ones, homes or both.

Brig. Maj. Jorge Vera, chief of the rescue operation, said 85 percent of Pisco's downtown was rubble.

Garcia predicted "a situation approaching normality" in 10 days, but acknowledged that reconstruction would take far longer.

Supplies of food, water, tents and blankets began arriving, and with Peruvian soldiers distributing aluminum caskets, the first funerals were held.

In Pisco's cemetery, lined with collapsed tombs and tumbled crosses, a man painted the names of the dead on headstones -- some 200 were lined up. Grieving relatives lowered a stream of coffins into shallow graves.

"My dear child, Gloria!" wailed Julia Siguis, her hands spread over two small coffins holding her cousin and niece. "Who am I going to call now? Who am I going to call?"

All day, people with no way to refrigerate corpses rushed coffins through the cemetery gate, which leaned dangerously until a bulldozer came to knock it down.

Doctors at Pisco's hospital were treating 169 people but failed to save 30 others. Medical services were moved to a basketball court and the damaged hospital building was being used as a morgue, said Dr. Jose Renteros, the physician in charge. Many injured had been flown to Lima.

More aftershocks jolted the region, frightening survivors, who fell to their knees in prayer, but doing little damage. At least 18 tremors of magnitude-5 or greater had struck since the initial quake, which people said pumped the ground in violent jabs like the pistons of a car engine.

Medina, the resident who dug his dead nephew from the school, was working at a Pisco ice cream factory when the earthquake hit Wednesday night.

"It was all I could do to keep my balance," he said, throwing his arms up and down to imitate the movement.

Searchers still sought bodies and survivors in the rubble of San Clemente church, where hundreds had gathered Wednesday for a funeral Mass when the quake struck. About 50 bodies had been removed, said Jorge Molina, the search team leader. "We've heard sounds. There are two places where we're hearing taps, very faint taps," he said.

Molina held out hope for finding more people alive -- a man was pulled from the church wreckage Thursday.

But searchers were having little luck as they went block to block in Pisco, shouting into piles of brick and mortar: "We're firefighters! If you can hear us, shout or strike something!"

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.