The White House says President Barack Obama's oldest daughter, Malia, is safe and never was in danger during a strong earthquake Tuesday in Mexico.
Malia, 13, is on vacation with a school group in Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico, according to reports from the region. The U.S. Geological Survey says the initial 7.6-magnitude earthquake was felt strongly in Oaxaca (wuh-HAH'-kah). The quake was followed by an aftershock that shook southern Mexico, swayed buildings in Mexico City and sent frightened workers and residents into the streets.
Kristina Schake (SHAH-kee), the First Lady's communications director, says Malia Obama "is safe and was never in danger." Typically the White House does not comment on the Obama children but made an exception because of the quake.
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.8 struck near Washington, D.C., the U.S.Geological Survey said.
The epicenter was in Virginia. The U.S.G.S is saying that
The quake was felt in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York, and on Martha's Vineyard where President Barack Obama is vacationing. Cell phone service has been disrupted in New York City where parts of Manhattan have been evacuated.
"Everybody was told to take the stairs," Wolf Blitzer said, speaking live at 2 p.m. E.T. from CNN's D.C. bureau.
The Pentagon has been evacuated, CNN's Barbara Starr reports. "When the building began shaking rather violently, hundreds of people began streaming out," she said, because many people thought that the building was under attack. Starr was standing in the Pentagon's press office when the roof started to shake.
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on Sunday urged her fellow Americans not to forget Haiti as she wrapped up a two-day visit to the crisis-torn Caribbean country.
"I do urge Americans not to forget Haiti," said Palin, who was in Haiti at the invitation of Franklin Graham, an evangelical preacher whose Christian relief organization, Samaritan's Purse, is involved in cholera treatment efforts in the deeply impoverished nation.
Haiti is still recovering from the January 12 quake that killed nearly a quarter of a million Haitians a year ago, and the 1.3 million people made homeless by the disaster are still living in makeshift camps and under tents and tarps in the sprawling capital Port-au-Prince.
"There were such ravaged conditions and environmental aspects of this country before the earthquake," said Palin.
"Haiti has been a country that has suffered in the past, that's going to continue to suffer until some fundamental changes are being made here," she added.
The country has more recently been hit by a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 2,000 people and is wracked by political upheaval over a contested presidential election that has sparked violent street protests.
Palin, the former U.S. vice presidential candidate who is considering a presidential run in 2012, did not refer to the political chaos and charges of electoral fraud, which have led to calls for the administration of President Barack Obama to suspend aid to Haiti.
But on a trip that could help bolster her foreign policy credentials, Palin said "job opportunities especially for the young people of Haiti" were something the poorest country in the Americas needed perhaps more than anything else.
"God created man to work, to produce, to be able to contribute and to take care of one's own family and one's own community," she said.
Palin spoke to reporters outside a Samaritan's Purse warehouse in this town in barren hills about 7 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
She declined to take any questions, saying, "We don't need to be getting political today."
She did appeal for foreign aid, however, after health experts last week called for intensive vaccination and more use of antibiotics to step up Haiti's fight against cholera.
The largest earthquake ever recorded near the capital rattled Washington, D.C., early Friday, waking many residents but causing no reported damage.
The quake hit at 5:04 a.m. ET with a magnitude of 3.6, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was centered near Rockville, Md., the USGS said.
NBC News reported that the quake was felt in the D.C.-area, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Amy Vaughn, a spokeswoman for USGS, told NBC station WRC that the quake was the largest recorded within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of Washington since a database was created in 1974.
The previous record within that time period was a 2.6 magnitude temblor in 1990.
"So this is pretty significant for your area," Vaughn told WRC-TV.
The area's last quake — with a magnitude of 2.0 — occurred in May 2008.
Gloria Jackson, a police communications supervisor for the Montgomery County Police Department, said the department has received numerous calls about the earthquake.
However, there were no reports of any damage or injuries.
'Thunder'
Debby Taylor Busse said she was in the basement of her home in Vienna, Va., when she felt the quake hit. She was already awake watching television, but her husband had been asleep in a second-floor bedroom when the tremor woke him.
"I didn't know what it was," Busse said. "I have never been in an earthquake before. It felt like an airplane going overhead or thunder, but it wasn't coming from above."
"I heard a sustained rumbling, like the sound of thunder or a low-flying helicopter," Nancy Kochli, of Culpeper County, Va., told WRC-TV. "I did not feel it at our home, but I distinctly heard it. It was loud enough to wake me from the half-sleep right before my alarm went off."
NBC News correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said he felt the quake for about 10 seconds at his Maryland home, which is located about 25 miles north of the capital.
"It started as a low audible rumble that built to a crescendo and shook the house and rattled the windows," he added.
NBC News colleague Tom Costello told TODAY that the quake reminded him of a "massive freight train" passing nearby.
Thousands of messages were posted to social networking website Twitter following the quake, with many people expressing surprise but not reporting any adverse effects.
One Twitter user, @olli85olli, wrote: "Holy cow ... earthquake! 3.7 on the Richter scale. Nothing in comparison to others, but this is new for us in Maryland/VA."
However another, @stevebuttry, wrote: "Quake didn't disturb any of the tiny items in @mimijohnson's shadow box, which can fall if you slam the door. Not that I ever do that."
Aftershocks possible
The USGS said it was possible that "smaller aftershocks" might hit the area. USGS geophysicist Jessica Sigala told WRC-TV: "But they should die out in a few days."
Sigala said the incident would help experts to discover the fault lines in the D.C. area.
"We all know the San Andres fault by name," she said. "But over here, they don't happen very often. So this one will help us (find the fault lines)."
The USGS said there had never been an earthquake centered within the District of Columbia itself.
However, ground vibrations from earthquakes far away have been felt by D.C. residents before.
A quake which did considerable damage to Guadeloupe, West Indies, in 1843 was felt in the eastern United States, including D.C., according to USGS information.
The earliest shock that may have affected some sections of Washington occurred on April 24, 1758, the USGS said. Its probable center was near Annapolis, Md., and it was felt into Pennsylvania.
A sequence of great earthquakes occurred in the Mississippi Embayment in 1811 and 1812, which were noticed by people over an area of 2 million square miles, including D.C., where people were "badly frightened," according to records.
First Lady 'much alarmed'
And a quake in March 1828 was felt over a wide area including seven eastern states and D.C., according to the USGS.
John Quincy Adams, then president of the United States, left the following account in his diary: "There was this evening the shock of an earthquake, the first which I ever distinctly noticed at the moment when it happened."
"I was writing in this book, when the table began to shake under my hand and the floor under my feet. The window shutters rattled as if shaken by the wind, and there was a momentary sensation as of the heaving of a ship on the waves."
"It continued about two minutes, then ceased. It was about eleven at night. I immediately left writing, and went to my bedchamber, where my wife was in bed, much alarmed."
Earthquakes in Chile, China & Haiti, the Worse U.S. Winter in decades, Tsunamis in Hawaii & Taiwan and now Iceland's Volcanic Eruptions all in less than a year's time.
Are these regular "Natural Disasters", signs of "Climate Change" or "End of the World" warnings to Mankind?
Its definitely something to think about.
By the way has anyone seen Al Gore lately?
Perhaps he can enlighten us as to what's happening with this weird weather.
Check out the videos and article about these catastrophes below.
Thick drifts of volcanic ash blanketed parts of rural Iceland on Friday as a vast, invisible plume of grit drifted over Europe, emptying the skies of planes and sending hundreds of thousands in search of hotel rooms, train tickets or rental cars.
Polish officials worried that the ash cloud could threaten the arrival of world leaders for Sunday's state funeral for President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, in the southern city of Krakow.
So far, President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are among those coming and no one has canceled. Kaczynski's family insisted Friday they wanted the funeral to go forward as planned but there was no denying the ash cloud was moving south and east.
The air traffic agency Eurocontrol said almost two-thirds of Europe's flights were canceled Friday, as air space remained largely closed in Britain and across large chunks of north and central Europe.
"The skies are totally empty over northern Europe," said Brian Flynn, deputy head of Eurocontrol, adding "there will be some significant disruption of European air traffic tomorrow."
Air travel grounded
The agency said about 16,000 of Europe's usual 28,000 daily flights were canceled Friday — twice as many as were canceled a day earlier. Only about 120 trans-Atlantic flights reached European airports compared to 300 on a normal day, and about 60 flights between Asia and Europe were canceled.
The International Air Transport Association said the volcano was costing the industry at least $200 million a day.
Southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier began erupting for the second time in a month on Wednesday, sending ash several miles into the air. Winds pushed the plume south and east across Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and into the heart of Europe.
Gray ash settled in drifts near the glacier, swirling in the air and turning day into night. Authorities told people in the area with respiratory problems to stay indoors, and advised everyone to wear masks and protective goggles outside.
In major European cities, travel chaos reigned. Extra trains were put on in Amsterdam and lines to buy train tickets were so long that the rail company handed out free coffee.
Train operator Eurostar said it was carrying almost 50,000 passengers between London, Paris and Brussels. Thalys, a high-speed venture of the French, Belgian and German rail companies, was allowing passengers to buy tickets even if trains were fully booked.
London taxi company Addison Lee said it had received requests for journeys to cities as far away as Paris, Milan, Amsterdam and Zurich.
The disruptions hit tourists, business travelers and dignitaries alike.
Germany's Merkel had to go to Portugal rather than Berlin as she flew home from a U.S. visit. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg managed to get a flight to Madrid from New York but was still not sure when or how he would get back home.
Shift in tactics
The military also had to adjust. Five German soldiers wounded in Afghanistan were diverted to Turkey instead of Germany, while U.S. medical evacuations for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are being flown directly from the warfronts to Washington rather than to a care facility in Germany. The U.S. military has also stopped using temporarily closed air bases in the U.K. and Germany.
Aviation experts said it was among the worst disruptions Europe has ever seen.
"We don't have many volcanoes in Europe," said David Learmount of Flight International, an aviation publication. "The wind was blowing in the wrong direction."
In Iceland, torrents of water carried away chunks of ice the size of small houses on Thursday as hot gases melted the glacier over the volcano. Sections of the country's main ring road were wiped out by the flash floods.
More floods from melting waters are expected as long as the volcano keeps erupting — and in 1821, the same volcano managed to erupt for more than a year.
Small amounts of ash settled in northern Scotland and Norway, but officials said it posed little threat to health.
But Europeans were urged to stay indoors if ash started to rain down from the sky, the World Health Organization said on Friday. WHO spokesman David Epstein said the microscopic ash was potentially dangerous for people if it started to "settle" on the earth because inhaled particles can reach the lungs and cause respiratory problems.
The ash cloud, drifting between 20,000 to 30,000 feet high and invisible from the ground, initially blocked the main air flight path between the U.S. east coast and Europe. On Friday, the cloud's trajectory was taking it over northern France and Austria and into eastern and central Russia at about 25 mph.
Fearing that microscopic particles of highly abrasive ash could endanger passengers by causing aircraft engines to fail, authorities shut down air space over Britain, Ireland, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Belgium. That halted flights at Europe's two busiest airports — Heathrow in London and Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris — as well as dozens of other airports, 25 in France alone.
Air space restrictions were lifted, imposed or extended Friday as the cloud moved.
Flights were suspended at Frankfurt airport, Europe's third-busiest terminal, and at other German airports including Duesseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne.
Irish aviation authorities reopened airports in Dublin and Cork and France allowed some planes to land in Paris. Sweden and Norway declared skies in the far north to be safe but kept a lockdown on flights to both capitals — Stockholm and Oslo.
Britain's National Air Traffic Service said the air over England would remain closed to flights until at least 7 a.m. (0600 GMT, 2 a.m. EDT) Saturday, although some flights were being allowed in Northern Ireland and Scotland.
Switzerland, Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary closed their airspace, and Poland expanded its no-fly zone to most of the country, excluding Krakow. Belgium extended its flight restrictions until late Saturday morning.
Iceland, a nation of 320,000 people, sits on a large volcanic hot spot in the Atlantic's mid-oceanic ridge and has a history of devastating eruptions. One of the worst was the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano, which spewed a toxic cloud over Europe, killing tens of thousands.
A series of strong earthquakes struck a far western Tibetan area of China on Wednesday, killing at least 400 people and injuring thousands as houses made of mud and wood collapsed, trapping many more, officials said.
State television channel, CCTV, quoted an emergency official, Pubucairen, as saying that the number of injured was believed to be more than 10,000.
The main temblor of magnitude-6.9 struck in southern Qinghai province, near Tibet, on Wednesday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The USGS recorded six temblors in less than three hours, all but one registered 5.0 or higher.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported that a number of school buildings had collapsed, citing witness reports that some students had been killed and others were trapped in the rubble.
Workers were racing to release water from a reservoir in the disaster area where a crack had formed after the quake to prevent a flood, according to the China Earthquake Administration.
The quake was centered on Yushu county, a Tibetan area in Qinghai's south, with a population of about 100,000, mostly herders and farmers.
The main quake sent residents fleeing as it toppled houses made of mud and wood, said Karsum Nyima, the Yushu county television station's deputy head of news, speaking by phone with broadcaster CCTV.
"In a flash, the houses went down. It was a terrible earthquake," he said. "In a small park,
there is a Buddhist pagoda and the top of the pagoda fell off. ... Everybody is out on the streets, standing in front of their houses, trying to find their family members."
The earthquake comes a little less than two years after a magnitude-7.9 quake in neighboring Sichuan province left almost 90,000 people dead or missing. That quake flattened several schools, killing thousands of students. Poor design, shoddy construction and the lax enforcement of building codes were found to be rampant, causing public anger.
Students dead, others trapped
Xinhua reported that the early morning quake had caused some schools and part of a government office building to cave in.
Zhu Liang, a driver at the Yushu prefecture government, told Xinhua that half of the Yushu Vocational School's buildings had collapsed.
"I do not know how many students have died," Zhu, who is now in the rescue operation, told the news service. "Students just got up and were yet to go to class when the quake happened. I recovered several bodies from the debris and found they were fully dressed."
"Buildings in our school were all toppled, and five pupils have died," said a teacher surnamed Chang at the Yushu Primary School, a boarding school with about 1,000 students. "Morning sessions did not begin when the quake happened. Some pupils ran out of dorms alive, and those who had not escaped in time were buried."
Xinhua added that residents said most students had been able to flee to playgrounds.
"Most of the schools in Yushu were built fairly recently and should have been able to withstand the earthquake," said Wang Liling, a volunteer worker for Gesanghua, a Chinese charity that helps school children in Qinghai.
Her group, she said, had heard that a vocational school collapsed in Yushu. "Many homes have been damaged, but we'll have to wait until this evening, when our staff arrive there, to understand anything specific."
Samdrup Gyatso, 17, who ran a shop in his two-story house in Gyegu, told Xinhua: "There are 10 people in my family and only four of us escaped. One of my relatives died. All the others are buried under the rubble."
'Thronged with panic'
In Jiegu, a township near the epicenter, more than 85 percent of houses had collapsed, while large cracks have appeared on buildings still standing, Xinhua cited Zhuohuaxia, a local publicity official, as saying.
"The streets in Jiegu are thronged with panic and full of injured people, with many of them bleeding from their injuries," he told Xinhua. "Many students are buried under the debris due to building collapse at a vocational school."
"A large crack appears in the wall of the Yushu Hotel, and part of a government office building also collapsed," he added. "I can see injured people everywhere. The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers."
State television Wednesday showed footage of paramilitary police using shovels to dig around a house with a collapsed wooden roof.
A local military official, Shi Huajie, told CCTV that rescuers were working with limited equipment.
"The difficulty we face is that we don't have any excavators. Many of the people have been buried and our soldiers are trying to pull them out with human labor," Shi said.
"It is very difficult to save people with our bare hands."
Officials said excavators were not available and, with most of the roads leading to the nearest airport damaged, equipment and rescuers would have a hard time reaching the area.
Downed phone lines, strong winds and frequent aftershocks were also hindering rescue efforts, said Wu Yong, a local military chief.
People from the Yushu prefecture highway department were frantically trying to dig out colleagues trapped in a collapsed building, department official Ji Guodong said by telephone.
"The homes are built with thick walls and are strong, but if they collapsed they could hurt many people inside," Zhuo De told Reuters by phone from the capital of Qinghai province after contacting his family in Yushu.
Five thousand tents and 100,000 thick, cotton coats and heavy blankets were being sent to help survivors cope with strong winds and near-freezing temperatures of around 43 degrees Fahrenheit, the Qinghai provincial government said in a statement.
The epicenter of the first quake was located 235 miles south-southeast of Golmud, a large city in Qinghai, at a depth of six miles, the USGS said.
Ten minutes later, the area was hit by a magnitude 5.3 quake, which was followed after two minutes by a temblor measuring 5.2, according to the U.S. agency. Both the subsequent earthquakes were measured at a depth of 6 miles. Another quake, measuring 5.8, was recorded at 9:25 a.m.
Xinhua cited officials at the China Earthquake Networks Center as saying at least 18 aftershocks have been reported and that more temblors exceeding magnitude 6 were likely to occur in the coming days.
Michelle Obama made an unannounced visit to earthquake-hit Haiti on Tuesday at the start of her first solo international trip as first lady.
The 46-year-old wife of President Barack Obama made the stopover in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince en route to an April 13-15 visit to Mexico. She arrived with Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden.
Immediately after the catastrophic January 12 earthquake that Haiti's government says may have killed more than 300,000 people, President Obama ordered thousands of U.S. soldiers and aid workers to spearhead a huge international relief effort to help the impoverished Caribbean state.
"First lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden are visiting Haiti to underscore to the Haitian people and the Haitian government the enduring U.S. commitment to help Haiti recover and rebuild, especially as we enter the rainy and hurricane seasons," the White House said in a statement.
Obama and Biden flew over the wrecked capital in a helicopter before meeting Haitian leaders.
Although most Haitians have unstintingly praised the U.S. assistance, many have asked why Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, has not yet visited Haiti, whose independence in 1804 following a slave revolt created the world's first independent black republic.
Michelle Obama's visit may go some way toward assuaging such feelings in a country -- just two hours flying time from the United States -- where her husband is very popular.
Other leaders, such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a number of Latin American presidents, have visited Haiti since the quake, described by some experts as the deadliest natural disaster in modern history.
International aid workers are striving to care for more than 1 million homeless Haitian quake survivors who are camped out in makeshift tent and shelter communities sprawled across the capital and in other damaged towns.
Relief agencies have started moving some survivors to a more secure prepared settlement.
But fears persist that unless safer, more permanent shelter is found for the hundreds of thousands of homeless quake victims, the imminent rains, and the hurricane season starting on June 1, could cause another humanitarian catastrophe.
Some aid groups have criticized the government and the United Nations for being slow to set up alternative safer sites.
At a donors' conference in New York on March 31, governments, multilateral institutions and non-governmental organizations from around the world pledged nearly $10 billion for Haiti's reconstruction.
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck northwest Mexico's Baja California on Sunday, rattling Arizona and southern California, and leaving at least two dead and 100 injured in Mexico, authorities said.
At least one person was killed in a building collapse in Mexicali, Mexico, according to the assistant director of civil protection in Tijuana. The other victim died when he ran from his residence into the street and was hit by a car, said Alfredo Escobedo, Mexico's director of civil protection.
All 100 injuries are concentrated in Mexicali, Escobedo said.
In California and Arizona, there were no immediate reports of injuries and only limited reports of damages.
The quake struck at 3:40 p.m. (6:40 p.m. ET) about 110 miles east-southeast of Tijuana, Mexico, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Pictures from Mexicali, a major metropolitan area and the capital of Mexico's Baja California state, showed sides ripped off buildings, telephone poles toppled, roads cracked and supermarket aisles strewn with food that had fallen off shelves.
The entire city has lost power, according to Alan Sandoval, Tijuana's assistant director of civil protection.
Residents across Southern California and Arizona reported serious ground shakes.
"We have not felt a shake like that since about 1979," Michelle Tapia told CNN from Brawley, California.
Joe Madison was shopping at a Wal-Mart in Palm Springs, California, when he felt the earthquake.
"I felt the entire store move, and people went running for the exits," he said.
Madison said people gathered outside in the parking lot until the shaking stopped.
"We felt it for about 30 seconds. It was rolling," San Diego County sheriff's Lt. Scott Ybarrondo told CNN. "Nothing fell off the walls here, but we have reports of pictures falling off walls elsewhere in the county."
The quake was the largest in the Baja California area since 1992, the USGS reported.
The 1992 quake, which struck in Landers, California, triggered an earthquake the next day in Nevada and another quake 11 days later in Southern California, according to USGS seismologist Lucy Jones. Both were 5.7 magnitude quakes.
Jones said Sunday's quake also could trigger others in the coming days, though she said the relatively quiet hours after Sunday's quake make other big quakes less likely.
There have been three large aftershocks so far, including one that registered a 5.5 magnitude, and other smaller temblors, USGS said.
Chandeliers swung and water sloshed around in swimming pools in the Los Angeles suburbs, witnesses reported, while posters to Twitter reported feeling the quake in Phoenix, Arizona.
Capt. Steve Ruda, a spokesman for the Los Angeles city fire department, said there were isolated power outages and a few people reported trapped in elevators, but no injuries or structural damage were reported.
Nine minutes after the Mexico quake, a magnitude 4.1 quake rattled windows in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. No damage was reported there, and Susan Potter, a USGS geophysicist, told CNN that was a separate quake from the one that struck in the Baja California desert.
The USGS initially reported that the Baja California quake had a 6.9 magnitude. The USGS upgraded the quake about an hour later.
Rescuers in this coastal city found signs of life in the wreckage of a 15-story building Monday as the world offered aid to victims of an earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 700 people. But the city also saw looters roaming the streets, and burning a looted supermarket, even after troops and police arrested dozens for violating a curfew.
Adding to the anguish, all six people aboard a small plane en route to Concepcion died in a crash on Monday. The passengers included university officials who intended to help with housing problems.
The toll of dead rose to 723, with 19 others missing, the National Emergency Office announced, in a magnitude-8.8 quake that President Michelle Bachelet called "an emergency without parallel in Chile's history."
Some coastal towns were almost obliterated — first shaken by the quake, then slammed by a tsunami that carried whole houses inland and crushed others into piles of sticks. Shocked survivors were left without power, water or food.
In the town of Constitucion alone, about 350 people died, state television quoted emergency officials as saying.
In Concepcion, the biggest city near the epicenter, rescuers heard the knock of trapped victims inside a toppled 70-unit apartment building and began to drill through thick walls to reach them, said fire department Commander Juan Carlos Subercaseux.
Only the chop of military helicopters flying overhead broke the silence demanded by rescuers straining to hear signs of life inside the building.
Since the quake early Saturday, firefighters had already pulled 25 survivors and nine bodies from the structure.
Food, Military slow to arrive
Mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe told Radio Cooperativa that some food aid was arriving in the city of 200,000 Monday for distribution to the hungry.
Electricity was still out, however, water was scarce and looters re-emerged at dusk despite beefed up security. Dozens of people sacked stores selling food, clothing and drugs, fleeing when police appeared to drive them away. Some struck gas stations, stealing cash from attendants.
As a small military convoy of drove down the main avenue, bystanders applauded and shouted, "Finally! Finally!" Some 10,000 troops have been promised for the area.
Concepcion police chief Eliecer Soler said officers arrested 55 people for violating a nighttime curfew imposed after looters sacked nearly every market in town Sunday. Troops ordered into the city by Bachelet patrolled to enforce security. A few looters re-emerged to rob a market on Monday.
Spanish professor Eduardo Aundez watched with disgust as a soldier patiently waited for looters to rummage through a downtown store, then lobbed two tear gas canisters into the rubble to get them out.
"I feel abandoned" by authorities, he said. "We believe the government didn't take the necessary measures in time, and now supplies of food and water are going to be much more complicated."
Across the Bio Bio River in the city of San Pedro, looters cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.
"It was a mob. They looted everything," said police Sgt. Rene Gutierrez, who had his men guarding the now-empty mall. "Now we're only here to protect the building — what's left of the building."
He said police had been slow to reach the looted mall because one bridge over the river was collapsed and the other so damaged they had to move cautiously.
Aid from abroad
The U.N. said Monday that it would rush aid deliveries to Chile after Bachelet appealed for international aid. U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said Chile was seeking temporary bridges, field hospitals, satellite phones, electric generators, damage assessment teams, water purification systems, field kitchens and dialysis centers.
"We are prepared to provide assistance," Byrs told The Associated Press in Geneva. "It could be quite fast, given that our experts are on standby and were alerted in the region."
The World Health Organization said it expected the death toll to rise in the coming days as communications improve. For survivors, it said access to health services will be a major challenge and noted that indigenous people living in adobe homes were most at risk from heavily damaged infrastructure.
About six weeks ago, a large earthquake devastated Haiti and killed over 200,000 people. Saturday, a huge earthquake releasing 500 times more energy, devastated Chile and killed hundreds.
So why did the smaller earthquake kill so many more people? And why the sudden spate of disastrous earthquakes in the Americas?
No, the apocalypse is not coming. No, the two earthquakes are not linked in any way. And no, Pat Robertson, you can't blame the Devil or the French. The real answers, for those comfortable with science and the Enlightenment, are tectonics and poverty.
Of the many revolutions of the 1960s, the one that really mattered to geologists was the revolution of plate tectonics. Tectonics is the word geologists use to describe the process by which mountains move and rocks squeeze and crunch.
In the sixties, new data from research cruises and from earthquake seismometers led to the realization that tectonics makes mountains slide sideways long distances. Earth scientists discovered that the Earth has a patchy skin of mobile plates a hundred miles thick and thousands of miles across, and that they move horizontally at a slow but irresistible pace. It's where they collide that our problems begin.
South America is a prime example of this process, one that geologists call "subduction." It's why we have the long chain of mountains called the Andes and it's why countries like Chile and Peru suffer giant, destructive earthquakes every few decades.
Off the coast of Chile is a tectonic plate called the Nazca Plate. Unseen by most, it has been inching its way towards the South American continent, and sliding underneath it, for well over a hundred million years. Since the day that Magellan first rounded Tierra del Fuego it has encroached by 130 feet in a roughly east-north-east direction.
The Nazca plate doesn't slide under the South American plate in an orderly fashion though. It moves in fits and starts, sometimes sticking and sometimes slipping, sometimes here and sometimes there. Along the coast of Chile, patches can get stuck for over a hundred years. When they do finally slip, they go with a bang. All that squeezing energy is released in seconds and an earthquake happens.
On Saturday a patch roughly the size of Maryland came unstuck, unleashing one of the most powerful tremors ever recorded. Fifty years ago, a patch four times bigger and with an area of about 50,000 square miles, the size of Louisiana, slipped and triggered the Valdivia earthquake. Its magnitude has been estimated as at least 9.5, making it the largest earthquake of modern times.
Over millions of years, this tectonic squeezing has formed the Andes and raised the high desert known as the Altiplano. Elsewhere it has created the Alps, the Rockies, the Himalayas, and Tibet. It has also created and distorted some of the islands of the Caribbean, including Haiti.
So that's why some parts of the world suffer from big earthquakes that strike with irregular frequency, while other regions are seismically quiet: it all depends on where the plates meet and how fast they are running into each other.
Knowing this helps us assess seismic risk and mitigate it. It helps us know where the strongest earthquake shaking will hit and roughly how often. Predicting when the shaking will hit is a much greater challenge, and geophysicists are working hard to reach that goal. In any case, prediction is not the real problem: poverty is.
Poverty is what ultimately kills most people during an earthquake. Poverty means that little or no evaluation is made of seismic risk in constructing buildings and no zoning takes place. It means that building codes are not written, and even if they do exist they are difficult, or impossible, to enforce. It means the choice between building robustly or building cheaply is not a choice at all.
Haiti is a tragic illustration of this. Weak building materials and poor construction standards share much of the blame for the grotesque numbers of fatalities, injured and internally displaced people.
Of course it's complicated. Earthquake shaking is a complex process and the chain of causation from earthquake source magnitude through infrastructural damage to human harm involves factors like the type of earthquake fault, its orientation, the hardness of bedrock or presence of wet soil, and so on. A lot also depends on the time of day the earthquake strikes in terms of how many people are inside buildings that could collapse. Population density, distance from the epicenter, and the depth of the rupture are the most important factors of all.
Nevertheless, those countries most at risk of seismic tragedy are not simply those on tectonic plate boundaries, but also those with the least money to spend on protecting themselves.
The death toll from the massive quake that hit a large part of Chile, and the tsunami that followed, rose to 708 and was likely to be even higher, President Michelle Bachelet said Sunday.
Rescuers continued to edge their way toward residents trapped in a toppled apartment block and survivors huddled around bonfires in the rubble of their homes.
Tens of thousands of Chileans fearful of aftershocks camped outside in towns shattered by the tremors, as officials struggled to grasp the scale of damage to transport, energy and housing infrastructure.
Government-run television reported that 1.5 million homes had been destroyed or declared unsafe.
One of the world's most powerful earthquakes in a century hammered Chile early Saturday, toppling buildings and triggering a tsunami that surged across the Pacific to as far as Japan and Russia.
The wave killed an unknown number in Chile but caused little damage in other countries, after precautionary evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people.
While the apparently low death toll could be considered a lucky escape from such a strong temblor, the quake dealt a serious blow to infrastructure in one of Latin America's most stable economies.
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.
Rubble
The largest death toll could be in the coastal city of Concepcion. Several hundred people might have been washed away by the tsunami and dozens were thought to be trapped in a 15-story apartment complex.
The university was among the buildings that caught fire around the city as gas and power lines snapped. Many streets were littered with rubble from edifices, inmates escaped from a nearby prison and police warned that criminals had been robbing banks.
Police and military personnel used tear gas to keep hundreds of looters away from a supermarket, where people left with shopping carts full of goods.
Concepcion Mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe said the situation was getting "out of control" due to shortages of basic supplies and called for the national government to help.
"We need the army. We can't have people defending their own possessions because it will be the law of the strongest," she said.
The search for survivors continued at the 15-story building, which toppled backward, trapping an estimated 60 people inside apartments where the floors suddenly became vertical and the contents of every room slammed down onto rear walls.
"It fell at the moment the earthquake began," said Juan Schulmeyer of Concepcion's 7th Firefighter Company, pointing to where the foundation collapsed. A full 24 hours later, only 16 people had been pulled out alive, and six bodies had been recovered.
Rescuers heard a woman call out at 11 p.m. Saturday from what seemed like the 6th floor, but hours later they were making slow progress in reaching her. Rescuers were working with two power saws and an electric hammer on a generator, but their supply of gas was running out and it was taking them a frustrating hour and a half to cut each hole through the concrete.
"We spent the whole night working, smashing through walls to find survivors. The biggest problem is fuel, we need fuel for our machinery and water for our people," added Commander Marcelo Plaza.
"It's very difficult working in the dark with aftershocks, and inside it's complicated. The apartments are totally destroyed. You have to work with great caution," added Paulo Klein, who was leading a group of rescue specialists from Puerto Montt. They flew in on an air force plane with just the equipment they could carry. Heavy equipment was coming later along with 12 other rescuers.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 8.8 magnitude 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) on Saturday. 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.
"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," Santiago resident Dolores Cuevas said.
Tsunami waves killed at least four people on Chile's Juan Fernandez islands and caused serious damage to the port town of Talcahuano.
On the other side of the Pacific, Japan's northeastern coast registered waves of up to 4 feet.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines and Russia's far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula were told to evacuate after the quake but there were no reports of damage.
Two million people in Chile have been affected by the earthquake, said Bachelet, adding that it would take officials several days to evaluate the "enormous quantity of damage." She declared a "state of catastrophe" in central Chile.
The earthquake has raised a daunting first challenge for billionaire Sebastian Pinera, who was elected Chile's president in January in a shift to the political right and who takes office in two weeks.
"We're preparing ourselves for an additional task, a task that wasn't part of our governing plan: assuming responsibility for rebuilding our country," Pinera said late Saturday. "It's going to be a very big task and we're going to need resources."
The government faces the task of helping Chileans rebuild an estimated half a million homes that were severely damaged as well as hundreds of buckled roads and collapsed bridges.
"It was like the end of the world," said Vicente Acuna, 76, in the southern town of Talca.
More than 100 aftershocks were reported in the hours after the quake.
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.”
Three hospitals in Santiago collapsed, and a dozen more south of the capital also suffered significant damage, a health official said.
Santiago reopened its international airport to a few flights after being closed Saturday due to significant damage. Flights were being allowed to land but passengers were not allowed inside the terminal.
In the mainland coastal town of Vichato, in the BioBio region, waves flooded hundreds of houses. Tsunami waves also swept into the port town of Talcahuano, causing serious damage to port facilities and lifting fishing boats out of the water, local television reported.
ADN Radio reported many beach towns were wiped out, including Matanzas, a wind- and kite-surfing destination that attracts many foreigners.
An earthquake also hit northern Argentina, causing a wall to collapse in Salta, killing an 8-year-old boy and injuring two of his friends, police said. The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude-6.3 temblor was a separate, "triggered earthquake" caused by ground waves from the Chilean quake.
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.
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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