The slide was more than a half a mile wide and 150 feet high when it hit the town, a roaring, lethal gumbo of mud, water and boulders. In minutes it had swept over a whole section of the town, strewed bodies six miles down the road, mounded up in the riverbed and changed the river's course.
This was the first word from an eyewitness of one of Peru's worst disasters. The avalanche had struck the town of HuarĂ¡s, Peru, in an Andean valley 216 miles northwest of Lima, in the early morning while most of its 9,000 people were still in...
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