Infernal Thunder Over Peru

This year, as always, the world's attention has been focused more often on the catastrophes wrought by man than on those caused by nature. It may be that because wars are man-made and therefore avoidable, they are more horrifying than erupting mountains and flooding rivers, over which man has virtually no control. Yet this year natural disasters have claimed far more lives than the fighting in Indochina and the Middle East. As many as 200 Europeans perished in avalanches; 1,100 Turks in an earthquake along the Anatolian Fault; 800 Indians in a searing heat wave; 200 Rumanians in the worst floods in the country's history.

Last week an event took place that far overshadows any of these disasters, and in fact any in the past several decades. In his 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder wrote: "Those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call the 'acts of God' were more than usually frequent. Tidal waves were continually washing away cities; earthquakes arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and women all the time." He was writing of Peru.

ON a warm afternoon last week, as the citizens of Lima talked excitedly about the opening of the World Cup soccer tournament in Mexico City, an all-too-familiar convulsion shook the city, accompanied by what sounded like the muffled beat of a million drums. The early news seemed reassuring. In all of Lima, only three persons had died, two of heart attacks, and only a few old houses had been toppled. As the hours wore on, however, alarming reports began to arrive from the northern departments. The seaport of Chimbote lay in ruins. The departmental capital of Huaras was practically destroyed. The beautiful resort city of Yungay, at the foot of towering Mount Huascaran, all but disappeared, like a modern Pompeii, beneath a layer of mud. When the government distributed an aerial photograph of the morass, the picture had to be labeled "Aqui estuvo Yungay" --Yungay was here. From the air, nothing was visible but the tops of four palm trees that had stood in the main square, the Plaza de Armas, and a white statue of Jesus in the cemetery.

Gradually, the full horror dawned on Peruvians. "Our losses," commented one newspaper, "will be greater than if we had lost a war." Indeed, officials speculated that by the time the last body is laid in a shallow grave and the last missing Indian villager is counted, the death toll might reach 50,000. If so, it will have been the deadliest earthquake in the recorded history of Latin America.

The Andean republics are a storm center of seismic shocks set off by the depth and turbulence of the Peru-Chile Trench in the Pacific, just off the coast. The Andes are under tremendous geologic pressure from both west and east, causing them to rise ever higher above the ocean floor; some day, aeons hence, they may be the highest mountains on earth. Peru itself lies within the "circle of fire," a ring of volcanoes and seismic fault lines encircling the Pacific from New Zealand up through Japan and the Aleutians and down the western rim of the Americas. Because of its precarious perch, Peru suffers an average of eight major earthquakes--and countless minor ones--every century.

According to the oft-repeated Andean scenario of disaster, an earthquake jars loose a gigantic slice of glacier and rock from a jagged peak. The massive landslide tumbles into a lake beneath the summit, breaking its natural morainic dam. This, in turn, sets loose what the Peruvian peasants refer to with dread as a huayco--a wall of water, rock and mud that can bury entire villages in the valleys below. In 1797 a huayco killed 41,000 Ecuadorians and Peruvians; in 1939 another took the lives of 40,000 Chileans.

The epicenter of last week's earthquake was located in the Pacific 42 miles west of Chimbote. But most deaths were caused by a huayco that emanated from the northern peak of the twin-pronged Huascaran in a spur of the Andes called the Cordillera Blanca, the highest mountain range in the Western Hemisphere. Apparently, a huge chunk of the mountain fell into chill Lake Yangwnuco and sent an immense slide thundering toward Yungay.

Over a battery-powered radio, a journalist named Lamberto Guzman sent a horrifying report from Yungay: "Out of 41,000 only 3,000 have survived--those of us who reached the higher areas before the huayco hit us. We had been terrified by the quake, and most of us were praying in the streets amid the wreckage of our city when we heard the infernal thunder of the huayco coming down from Huascaran. For God's sake, send us help. We have no medicine, no food. We have sent some men to one of the lakes for water; we are praying that they return today. All night the women have cried and prayed; some men were cursing, raising their fists to heaven."

That gesture was strikingly reminiscent of the angry words that Voltaire hurled at God--and at those of his fellow philosophers who endorsed the notion "Whatever is, is right"--in the wake of the disastrous temblor that leveled much of Portugal's capital in 1755, killing as many as 40,000. In his

Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake, Voltaire wrote:

Say, when you hear their piteous, half-formed cries,

Or from their ashes see the smoke arise,

Say, will you then eternal laws maintain,

Which God to cruelties like these constrain?

Boiling Sea. From Huaras (pop. 93,000), a survivor reported another scene of chaos: "Bodies of victims are being buried in trenches--not in coffins, for none can be obtained, but wrapped in blankets, and many children in old newspapers. Survivors wander around in a daze, like sleepwalkers, looking for food and water. Many children were choked to death by the dust that hung over the city. All we have is thirst, hunger, the stench of dead bodies and despair."

At Chimbote, Peru's second largest seaport, 80% of the buildings were destroyed. "People ran into houses to save somebody," said one eyewitness, "and many of these people were killed. I could see the sea from where I stood, and it seemed to be boiling."

Hundreds of survivors were rescued and flown to Lima for treatment. But in the Andean foothills, thousands of others, despairing of early rescue, were trying to make their way by foot toward the coast. Some were already looking ahead. "We will have to rebuild it again," said a native of the village of Ranrahirca, which was destroyed by a lesser earthquake in 1962 and rebuilt with government aid. "But maybe not in the same place. Every huayco that drops into our valley from the Cordillera Blanca passes through our village."

The day after the quake, President Velasco sailed into Chimbote aboard the navy cruiser Coronel Bolognesi to survey the destruction. Velasco, an army general who seized power in 1968, and had just begun to check inflation and whittle down the budget deficit when the disaster struck, ordered $16 million set aside for relief and reconstruction. A dozen other countries rushed aid--including the U.S., which sent the helicopter carrier Guam, despite Washington's displeasure with Velasco for his seizure of a U.S.-owned oil company. It will take vast sums to repair the effects of a catastrophe that has left 800,000 homeless in a nation of 13 million. Said one official, who estimated the losses at $250 million: "It will probably take us ten to 15 years to repair the damage."

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