Three dead found under rubble after avalanche in the Peruvian Andes

Rescuers found on Wednesday the lifeless bodies of three people, eight disappeared, following the avalanche that razed several houses in an Andean town in northern Peru on Tuesday, authorities said.

“We have managed to find the body of a third person, a 62-year-old male. He was in the rubble of a market,” Lieutenant Carlos Alberto Valderrama, police chief of the town affected by the collapse, told AFP.

Hours earlier, the brigades had recovered the bodies of a man and a one-month-old baby. They are the first three fatalities of the disaster, whose bodies were found in the rubble of a market.

“Rescue work was suspended for the time being due to heavy rain falling in the area,” Valderrama said Wednesday night.

Authorities had reported 15 missing persons on Tuesday, a figure that fell to eight following a new balance sheet.

“We have eight missing persons, including three children,” said before the discovery of the bodies, Defense Minister José Gavidia, in Retamas, where about 5,000 people live.

“We are organizing the police, fire brigades and miners to be able to enter,” added the minister, who moved to the scene on Tuesday to lead the rescue.

Gavidia also pointed out that the houses buried by the collapse were “approximately seven,” well below the 60 reported on Tuesday by the governor of the northern region of La Libertad, Manuel Llempén.

No explanation was given for the abrupt change in figure.

The landslide occurred on Tuesday morning in Retamas, a remote town located 2,800 meters above sea level in that region, some 500 km north of Lima, when the top of a hill over the houses fell off due to heavy rains that fell in the area in recent days.

Inhabited by families of miners, the town is 16 hours away by car from the city of Trujillo, the regional capital on the coast.

“I was able to leave in time, my house was buried. The collapse left us with nothing,” Ledy Leiva, who escaped with five other members of his family, told a local radio station.

- “Risk Map” -

The search work lasted all night, with a pause of a couple of hours, and resumed at dawn on Wednesday, with the participation of police and firefighters sent from other locations.

It is not the first time that Retamas has starred in such a tragedy. In 2009, an avalanche that buried several houses left at least 13 dead, including one child.

Peruvian President Pedro Castillo announced that in the Council of Ministers the people of Retamas will be “declared a state of emergency” after supervising rescue efforts and aid to the victims.

“We declare a State of Emergency in the town center of Retamas. We will register those affected to be relocated to a safe place, with better conditions and thus guarantee their health, education and housing,” said Castillo

Castillo regretted that poor people in Peru build their precarious houses in unsafe places.

“In Peru we lack a risk map, there are people who dare to make a roof [house] over a river, there are people who dare to drill a hill to build their homes,” he added.

The Archbishop of Trujillo, Miguel Cabrejos, lamented the “loss of human life” due to the avalanche.

“This place had already been determined as a high-risk area,” warned Miguel Yamazaki, director of Civil Defense Preparation.

Avalanches occur regularly during seasonal rains in the Andean region of Peru and in other areas of South America, where residential areas are commonly raised in areas at risk, such as hillsides.

On February 15, landslides caused by torrential rains devastated parts of the Brazilian city of Petrópolis, north of the city of Rio de Janeiro, a tragedy that left 217 dead, including 42 minors, and 33 missing.

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