Chile Toll at 700; 2 Million Are Displaced

By MARC LACEY and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: February 28, 2010

LIMA, Peru — The ground underneath Chile continued shaking on Sunday as jittery residents took stock of the devastating magnitude 8.8 earthquake that flattened homes, toppled bridges and took more than 700 lives over the weekend.

Among the dead were Lurde Margarita Arias Dias, 24, and her infant child, who were crushed as a wall toppled in their Santiago home. “I tried to save them,” Adan Noe Saavedra Rios, Lurde’s husband and a member of Chile’s Peruvian community, told local reporters. He described his frantic wife rushing from the house with their daughter in her arms after the ground started moving. Before he knew it, they were covered in rubble.

More than 2 million people have been displaced by the quake, according to the National Office of Emergency. Sunday morning’s aftershock was measured at a magnitude of 6.1, the strongest of about 60 to reverberate since the quake.

The death toll, raised to about 700 at a news conference at midday Sunday by President Michelle Bachelet, could increase further. In Concepción, Chile’s second-largest metropolitan area, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.

Power and telecommunications networks were still largely out of operation, hampering search and rescue efforts. President Bachelet said the Chilean air force would be distributing good and basic goods to the affected regions, but lack of electricity was limiting communications.

Images from Chile of toppled buildings, upturned cars and bodies being hauled from rubble resembled those of Haiti just over a month ago. But because of better building standards and an epicenter farther from populated areas, the scale of the damage from Chile’s significantly more powerful earthquake was nowhere near the devastation that Haiti suffered.

Televised images from Concepción on Sunday showed looters being detained by police as they sprinted out of a damaged supermarket carrying armloads of merchandise. But authorities said that calmness prevailed in most of the country.

The earthquake hit during Chile’s summer vacation, and that left thousands of Chileans stranded overseas. There were frantic scenes at airports throughout the region as the closing of the damaged Santiago airport prompted airlines to cancel or reroute flights away from the Chilean capital.

In Concepción, which is roughly 70 miles from the quake’s center, cars lay mangled and upended on streets littered with telephone wires and power cables. A new 14-story apartment building fell, while an older, biochemical lab at the University of Concepción caught fire.

In the nearby port of Talcahuano, a giant wave flooded the main square before receding and leaving behind a large fishing boat on the city streets.

“It was terrible, terrible,” said Adela Galaz, a 59-year-old cosmetologist who said glasses and paintings fell to the floor of her 22nd-floor apartment in Santiago, 200 miles from the quake’s center. “We are grateful to be alive.”

President Bachelet, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, called the quake “one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years” and declared a “state of catastrophe.”

While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.

The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900, set off tsunami waves that swamped some nearby islands before moving across the Pacific. Hawaii began evacuations before dawn, but by early afternoon there — more than 15 hours after the earthquake first struck 6,500 miles away — the fears of a destructive wave had passed..

Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.

In Santiago, the capital, residents reported having been terrified as the city shook for about 90 seconds.

Some people ran screaming from their downtown apartments, while car alarms and sirens wailed during the middle of the night.