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prevented some 250 polling stations to open on time, officials said. Authorities were asking the army and the defense ministry to help clear roads closed by blizzards.
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Peru's capital faces high chance of big quake but extraordinarily unprepared, experts say
• LIMA, Peru (AP) -- The earthquake all but flattened colonial Lima, the shaking so violent that people tossed to the ground couldn't get back up. Minutes later, a 50-foot (15-meter) wall of Pacific Ocean crashed into the adjacent port of Callao, killing all but 200 of its 5,000 inhabitants. Bodies washed ashore for weeks.
• Plenty of earthquakes have shaken Peru's capital in the 266 years since that fateful night of Oct. 28, 1746, though none with anything near the violence.
• The relatively long "seismic silence" means that Lima, set astride one of the most volatile ruptures in the Earth's crust, is increasingly at risk of being hammered by a one-two, quake-tsunami punch as calamitous as what devastated Japan last year and traumatized Santiago, Chile, and its nearby coast a year earlier, seismologists say.
• Yet this city of 9 million people is sorely unprepared. Its acute vulnerability, from densely clustered, unstable housing to a dearth of first-responders, is unmatched regionally. Peru's National Civil Defense Institute forecasts up to 50,000 dead, 686,000 injured and 200,000 homes destroyed if Lima is hit by a magnitude-8.0 quake.
• "In South America, it is the most at risk," said architect Jose Sato, director of the Center for Disaster Study and Prevention, or PREDES, a non-governmental group financed by the charity Oxfam that is working on reducing Lima's quake vulnerability.
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Decomposing whale carcass on California beach towed out to sea
• MALIBU, Calif. (AP) -- The decaying carcass of a whale that washed onto a California beach was towed out to sea Saturday, five days after it washed ashore and created a stench near the Malibu homes of movie stars and millionaires.
• A tugboat hired by a homeowners' association towed the carcass of the huge fin whale about 20 miles from shore, Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Brian Riley said.
• The 40-foot-long, 40,000-pound juvenile male washed ashore Monday near Point (Continued on page 27)
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