"Milagros Collagos Olavarria was in her adobe house by the pan-American highway when she heard a crack and felt the earth begin to shake 'as if it was going to swallow us,' Naomi Mapstone writes in the Financial Times.

"Grabbing her toddler Gerardo, the 25-year-old ran outside, where her neighbours were screaming as the heaving intensified. 'I was lying on the ground, holding on. The walls were falling, electricity poles snapped and then the highway split open,' she said.

"Ms Collagos lost six cousins and uncles that day - casualties of an earthquake that measured eight on the Richter scale and affected 75,700 houses in an area of Peru where many people were already struggling to make a living fishing or picking artichokes, asparagus, cotton and citrus fruit.

"By the time the aftershocks had ended, about 560 people in the towns of Pisco, Chincha and Ica were dead. Water and sewage systems were shattered, telecommunications in disarray, roads torn up, churches ruined."