World: 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 Huarás was practically destroyed. The beautiful resort city of Yungay, at the foot of towering Mount Huascarán, 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.