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Peru

Witness - From first moment, Peru quake felt like a killer

By Maria Luisa Palomino

LIMA, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Walking through an underground garage as the 12 floor office building above me shook violently, I knew right away that this earthquake was going to be deadly.

I grew up on a fault line between the Andes mountains and Peru's Pacific ocean, so I've felt many earthquakes, and the massive 8.0 magnitude tremor that hit Peru on Aug 15 was much stronger than any I had felt before.

I tried to alert my editors in Chile, but the cell phone network failed even before the walls stopped trembling.

I sprinted up the flights of stairs to our newsroom in downtown Lima, where a colleague had already filed the first news alert as the building still rocked.

We began reporting the damage. As our office building survived, I felt my own family would also be fine. Thankfully they were able to get a line through to confirm they were alive.

I thought sticking around made us brave but I saw the truly courageous people two days later when I drove to the heart of the disaster zone listening to radio reports of armed thieves, a prison break and bodies in the streets.

The highway south from Lima had fallen to pieces in places. Chaos had replaced fear. Desperate people on the roadside held up signs begging for food and water.

"My brother ... they just took his body out of the church," said Rafael Hernandez, 32, staring at the crossed-out name of his brother Juan on a list of those who disappeared in Pisco, 125 miles (200 km) south of Lima, the town which was hardest hit.

CHURCH COLLAPSE

Juan was buried alive when the San Clemente church that towered over the plaza of Pisco collapsed, killing 140 people attending a funeral mass.

As Rafael spoke, more bodies were being pulled out of the church. A refrigerated truck across the street served as a temporary morgue.

The pungent smell of death permeated Pisco's main square and cemetery. Rescue teams in masks and sniffer dogs gingerly stepped over piles of flattened buildings looking for bodies.

Stunned residents went to the town's main plaza to identify their dead children, parents, siblings and neighbours.

Terrified of aftershocks and roving bands of thieves, people dragged their beds out into the open to sleep and some patrolled the streets with clubs and iron rods.

More than 500 hundred people perished in the quake, most of them in Pisco, and some 37,000 homes were destroyed.

In a country where Catholicism runs deep, many found solace when rescue crews pulled an intact statue of Christ from Pisco's crumbled church and placed it in the plaza. Stunned residents wept at its feet.It was not the first time that Peru's seismic and religious histories have crossed. The Lord of Miracles, a painting of Jesus that emerged unscathed from a shrine leveled by a quake in Lima in 1655, is extremely popular. Every October, devotees flood the streets of Lima in its honor.

But in Pisco's crowded cemetery, there was desperation as homeless families squabbled over plots to bury their dead and stuck makeshift tombstones in the dirt.

"We're only going to give him a short burial," said Martha Cartagena, 48, who was in the graveyard to bury her uncle. "After all, we don't even have a house." (You can read more Reuters Witness stories by clicking on the URL http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage/reutersWitnesses or by typing it into the address bar of your browser)