Rescue teams battled through the night to find survivors after a powerful quake ravaged Peru's central coast, killing over 500 people in one of the country's worst ever natural disasters.
Aid finally arrived to the disaster zone after about 36 hours. But hopes of finding more survivors diminished.
The 8.0-magnitude quake struck late on Wednesday and many of its victims were poor, killed when their flimsy mud-brick homes caved in. Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed, forcing residents to lay bodies out on city streets.
People walk in front of a destroyed church in Pisco, 245km south of Lima
Some 510 people have been confirmed dead and at least 1,500 wounded in the earthquake, the United Nations said today.
The United Nations report, obtained by Reuters in Geneva, said the situation was worst in the cities of Canete, Chincha and Pisco, although other areas like Nazca and Palpa were inaccessible.
The Peruvian government, which has appealed for shelter items and medicines, will present a more detailed assessment of needs later on Friday, according to the report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
More than 24 hours after the quake, a series of aftershocks sowed panic in the hardest-hit towns, south of the capital Lima, although the rescue of a man from the rubble of a collapsed church brought some hope to rescuers in the town of Pisco.
President Alan Garcia visited the quake-hit areas yesterday and sent condolences to the families of the victims.
"Nobody is going to die of hunger or thirst," Mr Garcia said following complaints that aid was not arriving fast enough for some 80,000 people who lost loved ones, homes and belongings in Wednesday's magnitude-8 earthquake and the many aftershocks that have followed.
"I understand your desperation, your anxiety and some are taking advantage of the circumstances to take the property of others, take things from shops, thinking they're not going to receive help," Garcia said. "There is no reason to fall into exaggerated desperation knowing that the state is present."
Electricity, water and phone service remained down in much of southern Peru. Mr Garcia predicted that "a situation approaching normality" in 10 days, but acknowledged that reconstruction would take far longer.
That was obvious to everyone in the port of Pisco, where Brigadier Major Jorge Vera, chief of the rescue operation, said 85% of the city centre was destroyed.
The earthquake is one of the worst natural disasters to hit the South American country during the last century. In 1970, an earthquake killed an estimated 50,000 Peruvians in catastrophic avalanches of ice and mud that buried the town of Yungay.
Unicef (United Nation's Children's Fund) has activated an emergency response to the crisis in Peru.
Children and adolescents make up more than a third of the population in the affected areas, Unicef said today.
PA/Reuters