El Nino threatens to wash corpses from Peru graveyard

Lawmakers in Peru warned that the extreme weather system El Nino is threatening to wash hundreds of corpses out of a graveyard, and ordered the bodies to be moved.

A legislative commission on Tuesday ordered authorities in the northern town of Trujillo to move about a thousand corpses out of the Mampuesto cemetery to prevent them from being washed away when El Nino hits in the coming months.

"During the El Nino phenomenon in 1998, rainwater gathered in this cemetery and finally overflowed, causing coffins and corpses to be washed away beyond the main square in the town," the president of the special commission on El Nino, Virgilio Acuna, told AFP.

"Those awful events must not happen again. We are going to call on the mayor to reach an agreement with the company in charge of the cemetery to resolve the issue of the corpses."

Members of the commission visited the cemetery on Monday to assess the risk of damage.

Sparked by a warming in sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, El Nino wreaks havoc on world weather patterns every two to seven years, causing floods and droughts.

The latest wave of disruptive weather, which has just started and is forecast to last until next April, is expected to be one of the four strongest over the past 65 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Peru has allocated more than a billion dollars' worth of resources to prevent damage from El Nino.

Civil defense officials warn more than a million people in the South American nation of 30 million could be at risk if needed steps are not taken.

In 1982-1983, El Nino killed 9,000 people in Peru through floods and outbreaks of disease. In 1997-1998, it killed some 500 people in this country.