Carpet of Death

The summer afternoon in Peru was unusually clear, and Dr. Leoncio Guzman could see far up the spiny ridges to the mountain's snow-capped summit. "I saw a cloud forming and turning golden in the setting sun." he said. "When I saw that the cloud was actually flying downhill. I got into my car and drove as fast as I could to Ranrahirca, where my two children were guests at a birthday party. The distance I had to cover was only six miles, but when I got there, the town was already crumbling under the avalanche. I saw some children running out of the house where my two children were, and then everything went--vanished, like in a nightmare.''

"Run! Run!" At the brink of Glacier 511, below the peak of Peru's highest (22,205 ft.) mountain, a block of ice the size of two Empire State Buildings had broken loose with an explosive crack and plunged down the mountainside into a funnel-like canyon above a cluster of eight villages around Ranrahirca (pop. 2,456, according to last July's census). As it tumbled, the ice mass smashed into house-sized chunks, knocked loose millions of tons of boulders and mud, and grew into one of the endless huaycos (landslides) that make life on Peru's

Andean slopes a thing of constant fear.

Above the town, a 60-year-old widow named Zoila Cristina Angel watched the huayco's passage. "I saw it sweep by like a river, carrying away one farmer after another. Voices called 'Run! Run!' but I could not run. I could not move. I could not speak. I just looked at that awful thing that came rushing at us like the end of the world.'' Luckily it passed her by.

It took the avalanche eight minutes to travel the twelve miles from the face of Glacier 511 to Ranrahirca. Then, like an unrolling carpet, 1 1/2 miles wide and as much as 40 ft. thick, it blotted out the red-tiled roofs, orchards and unpaved streets of the town and its neighboring (villages. "I don't know why I didn't go mad," said Ranrahirca's Mayor Alfonso Caballero, pointing to the plain of mud and ice that covered his town. "That is where our cathedral used to be. It was our tallest building."

"No Injured." Mayor Caballero was one of 98 citizens of Ranrahirca who survived; the rest were surely dead. President Kennedy offered whatever emergency aid Peru needed, but medicines and splints were of little use in a disaster that erased everything in its path. A doctor, flown in on an early rescue mission, reported that there was nothing for him to do: "There are no injured."

Measuring off the area of the slide on a map, Peru's Health Minister estimated that between 3,500 and 3,800 people had perished in history's fourth worst avalanche.* Only a few of the bodies will ever be recovered. The only way to get a more precise calculation of the death toll will be to take a new census of the area and subtract.

*In 1920, some 200,000 Chinese died in combination earthquakes and landslides in Kansu province; in 1916, 6,000 Austrian and Italian troops were killed in an avalanche on the Austro-Italian frontier; in 1941, 5,000 Peruvians died at Huaras, 30 miles from Ranrahirca.

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