By Jean Luis Arce PISCO, Peru, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Rescue teams battled through the night to find survivors after a powerful quake ravaged Peru's central coast, killing about 450 people in one of the country's worst natural disasters in the last 100 years. The 8.0-magnitude quake struck late on Wednesday and many of its victims were poor, killed when their flimsy mud-brick homes caved in. Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed, forcing residents to lay bodies out on city streets. Peruvian firefighters and the United Nations said the earthquake had killed at least 450 people, while civil defense authorities put the latest death toll at 437. About 2,000 more were injured. More than 24 hours after the quake, a series of aftershocks sowed panic in the hardest hit towns south of the capital Lima, although the rescue of a man from the rubble of a collapsed church brought some hope to rescuers in the town of Pisco. "This is virtually a miracle, hopefully we can find more," said Carlos Cordova Gomez, chief of Peru's voluntary firefighters, who worked under flood-lights to dig through the church ruins alongside police, soldiers and volunteers. "For the time being we're going to keep on looking for bodies," said Felipe Aguilar, directing Army rescue efforts in the town. "For us, this is the priority right now, because we've already pulled one person out alive." In the square where the devastated church once stood, hundreds of residents gathered in the only part of the town of 120,000 with any light after the quake, which cut electricity and phone lines and cracked major highways. Pisco, famous for the grape liquor that bears its name, was worst affected by the quake along with the towns of Ica and Chincha, where hundreds of prisoners escaped from a jail when the tremor tore the old building apart. President Alan Garcia visited the quake-hit areas on Thursday and sent condolences to the families of the victims. Wednesday's quake was one of the worst natural disasters to hit the South American country during the last century. In 1970, an earthquake killed an estimated 50,000 Peruvians in catastrophic avalanches of ice and mud that buried the town of Yungay. In downtown Lima, the Peruvian flag flew at half-mast as Garcia declared three days of national mourning.(Reporting by Maria Luisa Palomino, Pav Jordan and Teresa Cespedes, writing by Pav Jordan, editing by Helen Popper and Vicki Allen; Reuters Messaging: pawel.jordan.reuters.com@reuters.net; 511 9 672 2246))
