Rescuers lose hope for Peru quake survivors

PISCO, Peru (Reuters) - Peruvian rescue teams combed the rubble of ruined homes on Sunday and relatives buried their dead in hastily dug graves as hopes faded of finding more survivors from a huge earthquake.

Wednesday's 8.0-magnitude quake killed more than 500 people in several towns in Peru's central coast area, most of them crushed when their flimsy mud-brick homes collapsed.

At the town cemetery in Pisco, which lies 250 km (155 miles) south of the capital Lima, people wept, prayed and sang hymns as they dug graves in the hard, dusty earth using shovels, sticks and rocks.

"We're only going to give him a short burial," said Martha Cartagena, 48, who was in the graveyard to bury her uncle. "After all, we don't even have a house."

Rescue teams said the structure of the traditional buildings made finding more people alive under the rubble unlikely four days after the quake struck.

"Here the chances are much, much lower," said Pedro Frutos, 46, a Spanish rescue expert whose team once found a survivor 11 days after a quake in Pakistan.

Mud bricks are heavier than modern bricks and do not have holes allowing steel reinforcement rods to be put in the walls. That means fewer air pockets are left when walls cave in.

The earthquake was felt the most in colonial Pisco, where at least 150 people died while attending a funeral mass in a 19th-century adobe church.

The last body pulled from the church ruins belonged to 77-year-old Maria Jumpa, buried by her nine sons and their children on Sunday.

The family marked her grave with bricks and a makeshift wooden cross painted with her name and date of birth.

UNIDENTIFIED DEAD

Many bodies had yet to be claimed, and in Pisco's main plaza a board listed descriptions of unidentified victims. Firefighters said they were still recovering bodies, although at a slower rate.

With the stench of death and broken sewage pipes filling the air, survivors complained government aid was not reaching them.

In Chincha, between Pisco and Lima, thousands lined up at a soup kitchen in the central plaza.

Blocks away, a few dozen young men armed themselves with sticks and clubs to defend their residential street against looters who have been robbing homes and stores.

About 34,000 homes were destroyed in the quake, 16,000 of them in and around Pisco. The official death toll stood at 502 on Sunday, but was expected to rise as rescuers pulled more dead from the rubble.

Experts said the mud-brick constructions had contributed to the death toll. "Earthquakes don't kill people, buildings kill people," an engineer told local radio.

Peruvian President Alan Garcia, who has worked and slept in the disaster zone since soon after the earthquake, said lessons would have to be learned when rebuilding begins.

"We're going to rebuild these houses, but it'll be with solid material," he said on Sunday.

(Additional reporting by Monica Vargas and Pav Jordan)