Word: ranrahirca
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...took the avalanche eight minutes to travel the twelve miles from the face of Glacier 511 to Ranrahirca. Then, like an unrolling carpet, 1½ 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...
...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...
...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...