Chile Earthquake Leaves More Than 200 Dead, Dozens Of Aftershocks

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Massive Quake Hits Chile Leave More Than 200 Dead, Triggers Tsunami



A monstrous earthquake pummeled Chile early Saturday, toppling homes, hospitals, bridges and highways and spawning a tsunami that splashed potentially dangerous waves ashore in countries across the Pacific.

At least 214 people were killed in the magnitude-8.8 quake, one of the strongest ever recorded, Interior Minister Edmundo Perez said.

Newly built apartment buildings slumped and fell. Flames devoured a prison. Millions of people fled into streets darkened by the failure of power lines. The collapse of bridges tossed and crushed cars and trucks.

"It came in waves and lasted so long. Three minutes is an eternity. We kept worrying that it was getting stronger, like a terrifying Hollywood movie," said Chilean resident Dolores Cuevas.

"Unfortunately, Chile is a country of catastrophes," President-elect Sebastian Pinera said, adding the quake heavily damaged many of the country's roads, airports and ports.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a "state of catastrophe" in central Chile. Housing Minister Patricia Poblete said as many as 500,000 homes were severely damaged across the Andean nation.

Hours after the quake, smaller-than-expected tsunami waves hit Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific Coast. There were no immediate reports of damage.

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Dozens of aftershocks

Chileans near the quake's epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant. Local radio reported 100 people were missing in a collapsed building in hard-hit Concepcion, one of Chile's largest cities with around 670,000 inhabitants. Firefighters rushed to put out fires, and most of the buildings in the city center were destroyed.

At least three people were killed by huge earthquake-triggered waves that smashed into Chile's Juan Fernandez islands, a sparsely populated archipelago that includes Robinson Crusoe Island, named for the fictional, stranded sailor, Reuters reported.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 56 miles northeast of the city of Concepcion at a depth of 22 miles at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. ET). The quake shook buildings in Argentina's capital of Buenos Aires, and was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil — 1,800 miles to the east.

More than 60 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater were reported in the hours after the quake.

Blazing buildings

A 15-story building collapsed in Concepcion, where buildings caught fire, bridges collapsed and cracks opened up in the streets.

"I was on the eighth floor and all of a sudden I was down here," said Fernando Abarzua, marveling that he escaped with no major injuries. He said a relative was still trapped in the rubble six hours after the quake, "but he keeps shouting, saying he's OK."

Upside-down cars lay scattered on one damaged highway bridge. Some residents looted pharmacies and a collapsed grains silo, hauling off bags of wheat, television images showed.

More than 200 inmates in a prison near Concepcion escaped when walls crumbled, Terra Networks reported.

Concepcion's city hall also collapsed, according to radio reports.

In the town of Talca, 65 miles from the epicenter, people were jostled from bed as their belongings cascaded around them from the shuddering walls.

A journalist emerging into the darkened street scattered with downed power lines saw a man, some of his own bones apparently broken, weeping and caressing the hand of a woman who had died in the collapse of a cafe. Two other victims lay dead a few feet away.

In the capital of Santiago, 200 miles northeast of the epicenter, a car dangled from a collapsed overpass, the national Fine Arts Museum was badly damaged and an apartment building's two-story parking lot pancaked, smashing about 50 cars whose alarms rang incessantly.

“I saw how the cars fell off and I didn’t know what to do. I was alone here,” said Mario Riveros, a security guard at a factory in Santiago, as he stood next to a bridge that had fallen, according to La Segunda newspaper. “ I felt like crying,” he added.

Three hospitals in Santiago collapsed, and a dozen more south of the capital also suffered significant damage, a health official said.

Tsunami Warnings

The jolt set off a tsunami that raced across the Pacific, setting off alarm sirens in Hawaii, Polynesia and Tonga. Tahitian officials banned all traffic on roads less than 1,600 feet from the sea and people in several low-lying island nations were urged to find higher ground.

Tidal surges of up to 7 feet hit some Hawaiian islands Saturday afternoon but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In southern California, a tidal surge swept away most of the navigational buoys in Ventura's harbor but no boats sank, officials reported.

Tsunami waves were also likely to hit Asian, Australian and New Zealand shores within 24 hours of the quake.

The quake halted operations at two major mines and Bachelet said a huge wave hit the Juan Fernandez islands, an archipelago where Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned in the 18th century, inspiring the novel "Robinson Crusoe."

"There was a series of waves that got bigger and bigger, which gave people time to save themselves," pilot Fernando Avaria told TVN television by telephone from the main island. Three people were killed and four missing there, he said.

Bachelet said residents were evacuated from coastal areas of Chile's remote Easter Island, a popular tourist destination in the Pacific famous for its towering stone statues.

A witness in a beach town near the main seaport of Valparaiso reported that 200 beach homes, most with people inside, were washed away, ADN Radio reported.

Many beach towns were wiped out, including Matanzas, a wind- and kite-surfing destination that attracts many foreigners.

It’s summer in South America and hundreds of thousands of people were vacationing at the beaches or starting to pack up to get back to work or school next week.

'Houses were really shaking'

Santiago's international airport was closed as the quake destroyed passenger walkways and shook glass out of doors and windows.

Simon Shalders, who lives in Santiago, told Sky News: "There was a lot of movement. The houses were really shaking, walls were moving backwards and forwards, and doors were swinging open.

"Santiago has got a history of earthquakes and basically there's not a lot of old construction in Santiago because of these earthquakes.

"The new buildings in Santiago are designed to withstand fairly strong quakes and they probably held up pretty well."

Sylvia Dostal of Keizer, Ore., said she was on the 23rd floor of the Marriott Hotel on President Kennedy Avenue in Santiago when the quake struck. "I had been in earthquakes before, including the San Francisco Loma Prieta quake, but this was different. The building was swaying AND moving up and down!" she wrote to msnbc.com.

"We made our way to the emergency stairs, since elevators were out of the question. There were children, babies and parents all in bathrobes and nightwear gathering outside the building," she wrote.

There were blackouts in parts of Santiago and communications were still down in the area closest to the epicenter.

Santiago resident Leo Perioto told CNN that "windows were wobbling a lot" in his six-story building.

"The whole building was shaking," he added. "We could feel the walls moving from side to side."


Early Olympics homecoming

Chile's athletes and coaches planned to skip the Olympics closing ceremonies in Vancouver, Canada, to get home as soon as possible.

Chile has three alpine skiers representing the country at the Vancouver Games. They've all finished competing, so they won't miss any events.

Scientists say the quake was a "megathrust" — similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean temblor that spawned a catastrophic tsunami.

Megathrust earthquakes occur in subduction zones where plates of the Earth's crust grind and dive. Saturday's jolt occurred when the Nazca plate dove beneath the South American plate, releasing tremendous energy.

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause "tremendous damage," according to the USGS said. The quake that devastated Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 was rated magnitude 7.

In 1960, Chile was hit by the world's biggest earthquake since records dating back to 1900. The 9.5-magnitude quake devastated the south-central city of Valdivia, killing more than 1,600 people and sending a tsunami that battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile's Pacific coast and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.


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