KAIDEN LEE-WELCH, 1, VICTIM OF HURRICANE FLORENCE IN NC; BODY FOUND

KAIDEN LEE-WELCH, 1, VICTIM OF HURRICANE FLORENCE - BODY FOUND TODAY:

PLEASE CONTINUE TO PRAY & VOLUNTEER TO HELP THE CITIZENS OF NORTH CAROLINA.


Post Sources: Charlotte Observer, NBC News, The State, Youtube


**** Florence’s toll: Infant killed by tree, 1-year-old swept away, killed by floodwaters


This story was updated at 10:45 a.m. Monday.

Rescue workers in Union County on Monday found the body of a 1-year-old boy who was swept away in floodwaters on Sunday, adding to Tropical Storm Florence’s death toll.

The Union County Sheriff’s Office said shortly after 10 a.m. that the boy’s body had been recovered. Investigators said his mother drove around barricades on a flooded section of N.C. 218.

Kaiden Lee-Welch’s mother was driving east towards Wadesboro, investigators said, when her car was floated off the road by waters from nearby Richardson Creek.

“Her vehicle left the roadway and came to rest amongst a group of trees,” the Union County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. “She managed to free herself and Kaiden, who was in a car seat, but lost her grip on him in the rushing water.”

On Monday, a Union County Sheriff’s deputy guarding the barricade on NC-218 said he’s been here since 1992 and has never seen the water so high.

Two rescue workers were seen coming out of a flooded soybean field near the road, carrying what appeared to be a container covered with a white blanket shortly after 10:30 am as a helicopter hovered overhead.

Elsewhere in Union County, deputies also recovered a man’s body in Marshville on Monday morning.

Observer news partner WBTV reported he was found beside a car after floodwaters receded on Landsford Drive.

In Dallas, N.C., an infant boy was the first person reported killed by the storm in the Charlotte area.

Kade Gill died Sunday after a large pine tree fell on his mobile home Sunday afternoon, Gaston County police confirmed. Sunday was also the day he turned three months old, reported Observer news partner WBTV.

The Charlotte region was starting to dry out Monday and clean up after Florence’s soaking, which delivered 11 inches or more to parts of the city and sent creeks and streams overflowing their banks.

Monday morning, 12,385 customers in Charlotte remained without power, Duke Energy reported, along with almost 4,000 in surrounding counties. City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County offices remained closed.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools were canceled for the third straight day, leaving 148,000 students and the children who attend daycares linked to the CMS calendar home again.

In Dallas, police said a three-month-old boy was at home with family members on Moses Court, off Old Willis School Road, around 12:45 p.m. Sunday when the tree fell.

“It basically just cut the trailer in half,” Gaston County Police Capt. Jon Leatherwood said.

The boy was pronounced dead at Carolinas Medical Center Sunday afternoon, Leatherwood said.

The Gaston Gazette identified his parents as Olen and Tammy Gill, and said the boy was in his mother’s arms on the couch when the tree crashed through the home and struck him in the head. Tammy Gill was hospitalized at CaroMont Regional Medical Center and released Sunday, the newspaper reported.

Kade Gill was alive and crying when his parents pulled him from the home, reported the Observer’s news partner WBTV.

“The tree had divided us,” Kade’s father, Olen Gill, told WBTV. “So I am in the kitchen. She (Kade’s mother) is in the living room on the couch. I had to come out and rip the air conditioner out of the window, and that’s when we handed him through the window.”

Including this case, Hurricane Florence has killed at least 17 people in the Carolinas. Eleven of those fatalities were in North Carolina.

Partial levee breach

A flash flood warning had been issued for southwestern Rowan County until 11:45 p.m. Sunday, the National Weather Service said.

It also said that at 8:44 p.m., “Rowan County Emergency Management is reporting a partial breach of the Lake Corriher levee in Landis.”

But it appeared Monday morning that the remainder of the levee would hold.

“Due to the decrease in heavy rainfall, water levels have receded from the dam and levee,” Rowan County Emergency Management said in a statement. They planned to continue monitoring the situation. Landis is about 30 miles northeast of Charlotte.

Rising creeks

Meanwhile, creeks rose all over the Charlotte area Sunday afternoon. The southern part of Mecklenburg County and its neighbors to the southeast faced particular trouble.

Rain gauges there measured massive rainfall over the past three days: 10.9 inches at Matthews Elementary School, 11 inches nearby on U.S. 74, 10.2 inches at McAlpine and Sardis roads.

At 1:30 p.m., after much of the metro area had been pelted since early morning with gusting winds and sheets of rain, the National Weather Service issued a rare emergency flood warning for south Charlotte, Pineville, Matthews and Mint Hill. There, the drainage basins of some of Mecklenburg County’s best-known creeks began spilling over into roadways, bridges and neighborhoods.

The emergency warning was quickly extended to Union and York counties.

The weather service told residents in the quickly expanding emergency flash-flood area that they faced an “extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” and the agency urged people not to travel unless they were evacuating.

“SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!” the weather service said in an unusually urgent Sunday afternoon statement.

In Union, afternoon flooding had already closed roads and bridges and set off home rescues, authorities said. At 4:15 p.m., the county Emergency Management Service announced a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew due to worsening conditions.

By 4 p.m., several creeks had risen above flood stage, the National Weather Service said. The Weather Service said McAlpine Creek would flood homes around Colony Road and Weirton Place and Little Sugar Creek was likely to flood homes near Archdale Drive.

Buildings near Addison Drive in southeast Charlotte were already taking on water from McMullen Creek, the National Weather Service said, and buildings along N.C. 51 in Pineville are at risk of flooding.

“At least 20 roads have been closed due to floodwaters in the southern part of (Mecklenburg) county. Travel is dangerous,” the National Weather Service said.

The threat of similar flooding is expected to cross the state line later today and move south into the fast-growing York County cities of Fort Mill, Rock Hill and Tega Cay, the weather service said.

Meanwhile, flooding along the Catawba River could come as early as Monday, Duke Energy says.

Doug Outlaw, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Greenville-Spartanburg, said bands of rain from the remains of Florence moving across South Carolina set off widespread flooding throughout Chesterfield County, S.C., then crossed the state line into Union County. There, rising creeks fed by rainfall and runoff crested bridges and roads, and forced home evacuations, he said.

In south Mecklenburg, rain also brought the water levels in Briar Creek, McMullen Creek and Little Sugar Creek to near flood stage, leading the weather service to issue the rare emergency flood warning, Outlaw said.

Across the region, Duke Energy says water could begin spilling out of several of its lakes above and below Charlotte starting as early as Monday evening, utility spokeswoman Kim Crawford told the Observer on Sunday.

The most immediate flooding threats are to areas along lakes James, Rhodhiss and Lookout Shoals, Crawford said, where the reservoirs are expected to be several feet above full pond by Monday evening, Crawford said.

Duke is also monitoring Mountain Island Lake, a major source of the region’s drinking water. But Crawford said Duke’s fears of flooding there have eased for now due to tapering rainfall in that part of the county.

Elsewhere, as the rainfall and runoff move southward, and are passed dam to dam around Charlotte, the flood threat moves into Duke’s reservoirs in South Carolina. The threat is particularly heightened at Lake Wateree, the last and lowest reservoir on the chain.

Catawba Riverkeeper Sam Perkins says the combination of rainfall and runoff will plague the Catawba basin for days or even weeks to come.

Duke began preparing for the arrival of Florence weeks ago by lowering water levels 4 to 5 feet in its four biggest reservoirs — James, Norman, Wylie and Wateree — in anticipation of what Florence was expected to dump across the region.

All that will be compounded by a massive runoff from the river’s countless tributaries, stretching hundreds of miles from the mountains to the S.C. Upstate.

As with rainfall, the bulk of the power outages appear to have occurred in the more heavily populated area of the region, according to Duke Energy.

The number of Mecklenburg County residents doubled throughout Sunday morning, to almost 30,000. At midday, Union County had 5,100 Duke customers without power; Gaston County, 3,800; and York County, 3,200.

By comparison, in New Hanover County/Wilmington alone, where the storm made landfall last week, the outages approached 104,000. Duke estimated that as many as three-quarters of its N.C. customers, or 3 million in all, could lose power before the storm ends.

Much of the Charlotte area and Western North Carolina remained under a flash flood watch into Monday morning.

The National Weather Service says the South Fork River in Gaston County is expected to crest at 6 1/2 feet above flood stage on Monday, threatening roads, bridges, parks and homes, particularly in and around Cramerton.
—————————————————————————


***** North Carolina 1-year-old missing after being swept away by rushing floodwater
Kaiden Lee's mother lost her grip on the child's hand after getting out of their car.
The search resumed Monday morning, according to officials.
A North Carolina 1-year-old was swept away by rushing floodwaters caused by Florence after his mother lost her grip on the child.
Search and rescue teams spent hours looking for Kaiden Lee-Welch overnight on Sunday into Monday after water from the deadly storm flooded the highway his mother was driving on as she headed east to Wadesboro, North Carolina.

"I was holding his hand, trying to hold him, trying to pull him up ... I couldn't hold on anymore, and he let go," Lee's mother told FOX 46 WJZY.

The search for Kaiden resumed Monday morning, Union County Sheriff's Office said in a Facebook post.

Kaiden's mother, identified as Dazia Lee by FOX 46 WJZY, told authorities she drove around a barricade on North Carolina Highway 218 toward Wadesboro, when she encountered the swift water rising from Richardson Creek.

The water pushed her car off of the road and and left her stuck in a group of trees, according to police.

Lee was able to get Kaiden out of the car, but the water caused her to lose her grip.

Lee sobbed as she described her son to the local news outlet.

"My son is 1 years old. He's the sweetest boy you could ever have," she said.

It was not immediately clear why Lee was traveling on the highway.

"I did everything everything I could from the moment I was pregnant to the moment I lost him. I did everything I could as a parent to save him and protect him," she said.

Family members joined police in searching for the boy overnight. Police urged residents to avoid Highway 218 due to ongoing flooding.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said on Sunday that flood waters were raging across the state and have created an enormous risk for residents of the state.

With Florence, which has been downgraded to a tropical depression, making its way across the region, flash flood warnings were in effect across much of North Carolina, as well as in northeast South Carolina and southwest Virginia, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The storm is responsible for at least 17 deaths, with the majority the victims located in North Carolina. Two babies and a mother were killed in separate incidents in Gaston County and Wilmington.

NORTH CAROLINA’S STORM OF A LIFETIME - FLORENCE (THE AFTERMATH)

NORTH CAROLINA’S STORM OF A LIFETIME - FLORENCE:

IT’S NOT OVER YET - THE AFTERMATH IS WORSE THAN STORM.

HURRICANE FLORENCE DEVASTATES NORTH CAROLINA -

DEATH TOLL IS RISING.

COAST GUARD CALLED IN FOR SEARCH AND RESCUE.

HELP & PRAYER NEEDED FOR NC RESIDENTS.


Post Sources: Charlotte Observer, CNN, Fox News, Weather.com, WRAL, Youtube


***** Storm of a lifetime


For days, residents had been told to heed the warnings. Hurricane Florence, at its peak a Category 5, would be the "storm of a lifetime"for portions of the Carolina coast," the National Weather Service said.

It would bring powerful wind, relentless rain and life-threatening storm surge to an area that wasn't used to hurricanes.

More than 1 million people were under mandatory evacuation orders as the storm crawled toward the East Coast.

t would soon become clear why residents had been told to leave.

The calm before the storm

As Florence twisted over the Atlantic Ocean Thursday morning, 65-year-old Deb Frese took a walk along the shoreline. The Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, resident knew the storm could be keeping her inside for a while, so she wanted to fit in one last stroll.

Frese lived in the evacuation zone, about a mile from the beach, but she chose to ride the storm out in her home.

"Flooding, that's the biggest concern," said Frese. She also recognized that she might have to make do without power. But with a stockpile of food, batteries and lanterns, she was prepared to hunker down for "at least a week," she said.

"Then I might have to go."
'This is just the beginning'

By Thursday afternoon, Florence's wind speeds had dropped, and the storm was classified as a Category 2. But forecasters said its biggest threats remained: potentially deadly storm surge, flooding, and what was expected to be a historic rain event.

In New Bern, North Carolina, along the banks of the Neuse River, a CNN crew watched the water rise and flood Union Point Park until they were forced to leave.

Todd Willis, a resident of Kennel Beach, North Carolina, shared video on Facebook of tidal flooding. It was early in the afternoon, and water was already collecting beneath homes lofted on stilts. Some water inched up to the road as Willis drove by.

"This is just the beginning," he said. "It hasn't even gotten here yet and there's already water (in the) bottom parts of people's houses."

By evening, the storm was downgraded to a Category 1. But conditions continued to deteriorate into the night, as thousands of evacuees slept in emergency shelters.

Annazette Riley-Cromartie's home in eastern North Carolina began to flood around midnight. As her kids tried to sleep in a top bunk, her husband could hear voices in the distance.

"While we were still waiting, my husband kept hearing people yelling for help," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper, her voice thick with emotion. Her 6-foot-2 husband tried to go out and help, she said, but the water was already above his chest.

"You just keep hearing people yelling, and you can't do anything," she said. "It's the worst feeling in the world."

Back in New Bern, 200 people trapped in their homes were plucked from the water overnight.

"WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU," the city tweeted. "You may need to move up to the second story, or to your attic, but WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU."

By sunrise Friday, the town had seen about 7 inches of rainfall and 10 feet of storm surge, and scores of people still needed saving.
Trapped by floodwater

At 7:15 a.m., Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, became eerily calm as the eye of Hurricane Florence, now a Category 1 storm, loomed overhead.

Florence, with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph, had made landfall.

Trees swayed from the wind and toppled over, blocking roads. Deserted streets flooded and swollen rivers escaped their banks. Power transformers exploded in bursts of light like fireworks, leaving hundreds of thousands of electric customers in the dark. Whole neighborhoods soon became swamps.

Back in New Bern, the Cajun Navy and other ragtag teams of volunteers joined emergency responders to rescue people from the rising water.

As water poured into their homes, residents sought refuge in attics.

"In a matter of seconds, my house was flooded up to the waist, and now it is to the chest," Peggy Perry told CNN's Chris Cuomo Friday morning.

"We have been up here for like three or four hours."
In River Bend, south of New Bern, a man shouted out of his open window at a small boat that had been left behind and commandeered by the Maryland Swift Water Rescue Team.

But when they asked if he needed help, the man said no.
He had everything he needed, he said. He just wanted to say hello.

The first deaths

A tree came crashing down on a house in Wilmington, North Carolina.

A family of three was inside the home, and emergency responders worked for hours to save them.

In the afternoon, authorities confirmed that a woman and her infant daughter were dead -- the first known deaths attributed to Florence. The child's father was taken to a local hospital.

A group of firefighters who had rushed to the scene were shaken. They knelt outside the home in a circle and began to pray.

It's time to go'

By Friday evening, Florence had been downgraded to a Tropical Storm.

But the rain showed no signs of abating and rivers continued to spill over their banks.

On Saturday morning, the National Weather Service warned of the possibility of "catastrophic flooding."

"We face walls of water at our coast, along our rivers, across farmland, in our cities and in our towns," North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper told reporters that morning. "More people now are facing imminent threat than when the storm was just off shore."

Susan Bostic and her family had initially planned to wait out the storm in their Rocky Point, North Carolina home, not far from the Cape Fear River.

They changed their minds on Saturday, as water from the river spilled onto their property, collecting in big pools on the ground.

Bostic had lived through Hurricane Floyd in 1999, she said, and it took everything -- cars, clothes, her home.

"And they're expecting this to be even higher," she said. "So we know it's time to go."

About 40 miles to the northeast, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, Marti Dias was grappling with the same realization. She watched water from the New River slowly creep up her street, mailboxes jutting above the surface. Some of her neighbors had already left. It was time to go.

"I'm not going to lie, I cried this morning," she told CNN. "I broke down and cried."

Residents of Lumberton, North Carolina, also kept a wary eye on their own Lumber River, which quickly rose foot after foot as heavy rains continued to drench the state. The river had inundated Lumberton two years before, during Hurricane Matthew, and city officials scrambled this week to plug a hole in the town's levee system.

As floodwaters rose, roads quickly became impassable. An abandoned car was left running idle in the street with water lapping at the passenger windows.

That night, emergency responders and volunteers in Wilmington, North Carolina, made about 700 rescues; Pender County conducted 172, and lost two ambulances in the floodwaters.

By the end of the day, 13 people would be confirmed dead, several of them from flash flooding.

On Saturday evening, Hailey Burgalow was traveling to Virginia with her sister, her sister's boyfriend and her aunt when they hit flooding on Interstate 95, forcing them to pull off and venture into Lumberton.

The town was still in the process of recovering from Hurricane Matthew, and many homes appeared to be abandoned or in disrepair, their windows boarded up and weeds growing tall in the yards.

The group parked at a gas station and tried to get some sleep in the car, Burgalow told CNN. Eventually, a police officer stopped, and they asked him if there was any way to make their way north. There wasn't, the officer told them. He directed them to a shelter that was filled with evacuees.

"They ran out of cots and blankets," Burgalow told CNN. "It was super crowded, but we were thankful."
On Sunday morning, Burgalow and her family realized they were stuck there.

Flooded roads and fragile levees

The National Hurricane Center issued its final advisory for Florence on Sunday morning as the storm, crawling inland, weakened to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of 35 mph -- but plenty of rain was still on its way.

The center said in its last advisory that southeast North Carolina could see up to 40 inches of rain, and also warned of the risks of landslides across western North Carolina and southwest Virginia.

Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo called the flooding in the northern part of the county a "phenomenon," and "something we've never seen before." The city was essentially cut off from the rest of the state because of high waters, he said.

Any direction you try coming into the city -- from 20 to 40 miles out, roads are impassable," he said. "Anyone trying to get in here -- don't try. You will be turned away."

The Lumber River was close to 25 feet high by midday -- 12 feet above flood stage. At 26 feet, Lumberton city officials said, the levee around the river could be overwhelmed.

At that point, "all bets are off," said Corey Walters, deputy director of Public Works.

The rain had slowed down overnight, he said, giving officials another chance to try and plug the gap in the levee system -- but Walters didn't sound optimistic.

"Our crews are taking one more crack at trying to stop it," Walters said. "We're just fighting time here. There's another rain band that's going to be coming through and we know it. We're expecting to get another 4 to 6 inches."

Water began seeping beneath the sand barriers workers had placed there Sunday afternoon.

Bobby Hunt was just about finished packing belongings into the back of his pickup truck.

"Y'all ready? Lets get in the truck and get out of here," Hunt told his wife and cousin as they prepared to leave their boarded-up Lumberton home, which still bore the damage from Hurricane Matthew.

That storm had caught them by surprise with flooding in the middle of the night, he told CNN.

But after being told by the city that the levee could be overwhelmed, the family didn't hesitate to leave.

On Sunday, Bostic, who fled her Rocky Point home the day before, learned she and her family got out just in time.

Her home, about 200 yards from the river bank, was submerged, and the water was still rising.
Nearly 20 years after Bostic lost almost everything to Hurricane Floyd, Florence would also force her to start over.
It's not over

On Sunday, two more deaths were confirmed in South Carolina, bringing the toll to at least 18.

Hundreds upon hundreds had been rescued in the Carolinas.

There were at least 170 patients in four medical shelters across the state, and officials believed more would be on their way as the rescues and flooding continued throughout the day.

Pender County, North Carolina officials said they had received 300 calls for help by Sunday.

Rescue attempts and other essential services were hindered by a lack of fuel.

Gov. Cooper accompanied the Coast Guard on a flyover of flooded areas in North Carolina.

He said he saw significant flooding in the farmland of Jacksonville and throughout Onslow County.

In New Bern, where the drama of Friday morning had significantly diminished, the governor saw boats washed up in town and significant debris.

Flying over Fayetteville, he said, "it was stark to see the raging Cape Fear River, and you knew it was rising and you could see these vulnerable communities."

We've got a tall task ahead," Cooper said.

The rain had slowed a little in Fayetteville, but officials there worried that would lure residents into a false sense of security and prompt them to make their way back.

"We're going to get hammered," said Kevin Arata, the city's director of communications.

"The worst is still yet to come."

HURRICANE HARVEY'S REAL DEATH TOLL NOT REVEALED JUST AS KATRINA'S NEVER WAS (DEPOPULATION)

HURRICANE HARVEY'S REAL DEATH TOLL NOT REVEALED JUST AS KATRINA'S NEVER WAS (DEPOPULATION):

FED GOVT WON'T ADMIT KATRINA'S DEATH MUCH HIGHER THEN 1800 AND HARVEY'S MUCH HIGHER THAN 50.

MANY OF KATRINA'S DEAD REMAIN ENTOMBED FOREVER IN HIDDEN GRAVES; SAME WILL OCCUR WITH HARVEY'S DEAD.

MOST OF THE DEAD WILL BE POOR AND BLACK.

FEEL-GOOD STORIES ABOUT RESPONSE RECOVERY TIMES FREQUENTLY USED TO HIDE REAL DEATH TOLLS.


Sources: TIME, MSN, NBC News, YouTube


***** Hurricane Harvey's Death Toll Rises to 30 as Floodwaters Recede


Now that the sun is finally shining and the murky, brown floodwaters are slowly receding in much of the Houston area, grim reality is setting in.

Harvey is about to release its dead.

In Texas, the official death toll surpassed 30 on Wednesday and was expected to climb as authorities investigated several other deaths to determine whether they were storm-related.

Officials fear that the number of fatalities will climb sharply in coming days as neighbors, emergency workers and family members search for the missing — and discover the bodies of people trapped in waterlogged homes or encased in underwater graves inside cars.

And the death toll might rise even further in the recovery phase, from car crashes, carbon monoxide poisoning or other accidents during cleanup.

"Historically all estimates of deaths are wrong in the beginning," said Craig Fugate, who was the Federal Emergency Management Agency director from 2009 until earlier this year.

Already, the nation is shocked by the horrors revealed as the storm moves out of the area and east toward Louisiana and points north.

The first confirmed fatality came early: A man in the Gulf coastal city of Rockport was killed in a fire late Friday as the storm raged ashore.

On Wednesday, officials located a submerged van that seven members of a Houston family had been traveling in when it was swept off a bridge and into a storm-ravaged bayou.

Samuel Saldivar told police he was trying to bring his elderly parents and his brother's four grandchildren to safety from their flooded home on Sunday when the van he was driving was tossed by a strong current into the bayou as it crossed the bridge.

He escaped through a window but the six others were trapped when the van's partially submerged sliding door wouldn't open.

Also Wednesday, authorities said 65-year-old Donald Rogers and his 58-year-old wife, Rochelle, drowned when they were swept away by a current after driving their pickup truck into floodwaters in a rural area southwest of Houston.

Fort Bend County Sheriff's Maj. Chad Norvell said the couple was on the phone with 911 asking for help when the line went silent. When officers found the truck, it was completely submerged.

Sunlight Returns to Houston, Revealing the Grim Reality of Harvey's Aftermath

On Tuesday afternoon, a 3-year-old girl was found alive in a rain-swollen canal, clinging to the body of her drowned mother in Beaumont, Texas.

A second woman was confirmed dead in Beaumont on Wednesday.
Earlier Tuesday, the body of 61-year-old Houston Police Sgt. Steve Perez was found in his car. He'd been swept down a flooded road as he drove to his precinct, determined to serve his community.

Eleven other confirmed deaths, some of which were listed on a Harris County database, showed people were found floating in waters — some in homes or businesses, others near cars.

Among those victims was Ruben Jordan, a high school football and track coach, who was last seen late Saturday helping people through floodwaters.

His family was informed on Monday that he had died in the floods.

"The sad thing is, of the deaths we've seen, we're going to see more, unfortunately," said Jeff Schlegelmilch, the deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "That number doesn't stop moving up until we're well into the recovery phase."

No official number of the missing has been released, and a spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff's Office, where Houston is located, said there isn't a specific strategy in place to look for additional bodies.

"We are going to go out and try to find any potential victims that may be there," said the spokesman, Jake Smith. "We are also encouraging the public if they come across anything, we strongly urge them to call 911 if they find a body or a potential victim."

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the department had received 47 missing persons reports since Harvey inundated the city and 27 of those individuals have been located.

Photos with pleas for help have been posted on social media, cut-and-pasted and retweeted by thousands of people as desperate family members seek loved ones they fear may be dead — but who may only have a cellphone without power.

The uncertainty is terrifying.
One of the worries, said Schlegelmilch, is that many of the severely flooded neighborhoods weren't in evacuation areas.

Additionally, the people most likely to be found dead are the elderly, the infirm and the people who were isolated from others — along with folks who didn't have the means or wherewithal to flee.

Sometimes it's a matter of having the strength to wade through floodwaters a few blocks to safety, or to pull one's self up onto a roof.

"Those who are the most vulnerable when the sky is blue, they are also the most vulnerable when the sky is gray," Schleglemilch said.

Fugate, the former FEMA head, said it's also common for people to die during the recovery phase, when stress levels are high and people aren't making clear-headed decisions.

"Stay safe, stay home, stay off the roads if you can. Don't go sightseeing," he warned.
Still, experts say there is some good news:

They don't expect the death toll from Harvey to come anywhere close to that of Katrina, when 1,800 people died.

Many of those flood-related fatalities came when a levee broke and water inundated New Orleans.

People were stranded in extreme heat and the federal response was slow.

Emergency managers learned painful lessons during Katrina, and have put those lessons to use in this storm.

Residents of New Orleans during Katrina saw top-to-bottom failures at every level, experts said.

During Harvey, "state and local officials and FEMA were mobilizing, water rescue teams were prepared, in anticipation of this," said Fugate, adding that safe shelters were almost immediately in place for Texas residents, unlike New Orleans. "That provided faster rescues."

One other thing seems to have helped Houston in its time of need: the residents themselves.

"Neighbors helping neighbors," Fugate said. "That will keep the death toll down."

KATRINA'S REAL DEATH TOLL NEVER REVEALED BY FED GOV'T (DEPOPULATION)

KATRINA'S REAL DEATH TOLL NEVER REVEALED BY FED GOV'T (DEPOPULATION):

MOST OF KATRINA'S DEAD WERE POOR & BLACK.


Sources: US News, YouTube


***** No One Knows How Many People Died in Katrina


Ten years after the third-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, we still don't know how many people died because of it. We'll never know for certain how many people died in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The problems are inherent in the confusion of disasters, especially those involving multiple states and various local, state and federal agencies.

Inquires to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and The Department of Health in Louisiana led U.S. News to a 2008 report as the most accurate and updated source of information. The report was years in the making as deaths were investigated and missing persons were located. In an effort to cut down on the confusion among agencies, the report reviewed all available death databases to attempt the impossible: an accurate count of Katrina's victims in Louisiana.

Although 1,833 is an often-cited mortality figure, it is older than figures in the report and none of the agencies we spoke to claimed it as an accurate estimate of the final death toll, as FiveThirtyEight also reported.

The most likely cause of death was drowning. The victims of the storm were often black and skewed older. In Orleans Parish, where 70 percent of the victims counted in the study died, the mortality rate for black adults was 1.7 times to 4 times higher than the mortality rate for white adults.

Forty percent of victims were aged 75 or older, which further complicated the process of counting victims. Many of the deceased had serious preexisting medical conditions. It's impossible to know if the person would have died from those conditions if the storm hadn't occurred or if the storm exacerbated medical conditions enough to cause death.

"If an evacuee died after a heart attack two months following the storm, was that death attributable to Katrina?" says John Ford of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

The researchers confirmed 986 victims (including 15 deaths from Louisiana evacuees in other states), but called the estimate "conservative." The higher estimate for deaths in Louisiana was 1,440.

This graphic shows the conservative estimate, including the staggering impact on the elderly population. While the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina is likely much higher, even the lower bound shows the devastating impact of a huge storm that New Orleans was ill-equipped to handle.

While the death toll in the study is 986, the total in the graphic is slightly lower because it doesn't include the 15 deaths from other states or the 22 deaths for which age information was not available.

Chile Struggles To Recover, Deals With Massive Looting

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Signs Of Life & Looting, In Quake-Hit City


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.


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Sources: MSNBC, Google Maps

Chile vs Haiti Earthquakes: Why Haiti's Death Toll Was Higher

Why Haiti's Quake Toll Higher Than Chile's



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.

Sources: CNN

Chile Earthquake Death Toll Now Tops 708, Hillary Clinton To Visit

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Chile Quake Death Toll Jumps To 708


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.

'Enormous quantity of damage'

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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."

'Like the end of the world'

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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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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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Chile Struck By 8.8 Magnitude Earthquake, Many Killed

Huge Chile Quake Downs Buildings, Kills 76



A massive magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, killing at least 76 people, triggering a tsunami and rattling buildings more than 200 miles away.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a "state of catastrophe".

Telephone and power lines were down, making a quick damage assessment difficult in the early morning darkness. At least 15 aftershocks were reported, including one registering at 6.9 on the Richter scale.

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).

Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the USGS told NBC News that the quake released 500 times more energy than the than the one that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12. The quake was felt in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is located more than 800 miles away.

Tsunami warnings were issued over a wide area, including Hawaii, South America, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, Russia and many Pacific islands.

NBC station KNHL reported that the first tsunami wave was expected to reach Hawaii's coastline at 11:19 a.m. local time (4:19 p.m. ET). It warned that "urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property."

Giant Wave

Reuters reported that a tsunami caused by the quake caused "serious damage" to Chile's sparsely populated Juan Fernández Islands. Citing local police, CNN reported that the islands had been hit by a 40-meter (131 foot) wave.

Patricio Rosende, the country's deputy interior minister, confirmed that 76 people had been killed. Edmundo Perez Yoma, the interior minister, warned the death toll "will continue rising."

Bachelet, the country's president, urged people to stay calm. "With a quake of this size we undoubtedly can't rule out more deaths and probably injuries," she said.

Jen Ross, a journalist based in Santiago, told NBC's TODAY that she felt "three minutes of shaking".

Broadcaster TVN reported that several hospitals had suffered structural damage and were being evacuated.

'It's like the end of the world'

"Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it's like the end of the world," one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings.

An Associated Press Television News cameraman said some buildings collapsed in the capital Santiago, which lies about 200 miles north of the epicenter.

In the moments after the quake, people streamed onto the streets of the capital, hugging each other and crying.

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."

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

Eben Harrell, a London-based Time magazine journalist who was visiting Santiago, described the quake as "very frightening". He told msnbc.com that cell phone services were patchy in the city.

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."

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause "tremendous damage," the USGS said. The quake that devastated Port-au-Prince on January 12 was rated magnitude 7.0.

'Threat to more distant coasts'

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the Chile quake generated a tsunami that may have been destructive along the coast near the epicenter "and could also be a threat to more distant coasts."

According to a 2002 census, Concepcion is one of the largest cities in Chile with a population of around 670,000.

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 1,655 people and sending a tsunami which battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile's Pacific seaboard and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.


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Anderson Cooper Saves Haitian Boy; Haiti Death Toll 200,000+

Anderson Cooper
AC360° Anchor


Anderson In The Midst Of Looting Chaos



We were covering another story when we heard shots being fired. We ran toward the sound and found a store being looted. Two Haitian police officers were occasionally firing into the air to try to keep order, but that only worked for a few moments, then the looting would begin again.

They were stealing boxes of candles. An American businessman named Tony who owns two stores nearby barricaded one street to keep looters away. He had armed the two Haitian police with automatic weapons, and they were assisting him, but they were not able to control anything beyond their barricade.

It quickly became a free-for-all. Young men began fighting one another for the stolen items. A number of young men had knives, and planks of wood, screwdrivers and rocks. They were using their improvised weapons to threaten and injure others who had stolen items from the store. The robbers were now being robbed. One group of looters whipped another man with a leather belt. They punched him as well, and they stole the sack of goods he'd just stolen.

I was in the midst of the melee with Charlie Moore, my producer, Neil Hallsworth my cameraman, Vlad Duthiers, my translator, and there was a still photographer from Getty Images with us, photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik. As things got really out of control, I saw a looter on the roof of the store they'd broken into throw what I think was part of a concrete block into the crowd. It hit a small boy in the head.

I saw him collapse. More chunks of concrete were being thrown at the looters on the roof. The injured boy couldn't get up. He'd try and then collapse again. Blood was pouring from his head. He was conscious but had no control over his body. I was afraid someone on the roof would see him lying there and throw another cinder block piece onto him. I was afraid he'd get killed. No one seemed to be helping him.

I ran to where he was struggling, and picked him up off the ground. I brought him to a spot about a hundred feet away. I could feel his warm blood on my arms. I stood him up, but he was clearly unable to walk. He wiped his bloody face, and I tried to reassure him. He had no idea where he was, and he clearly couldn't walk, so I picked him up again and handed him over to someone behind that makeshift barricade. Tony, the American businessman, gave the boy a wet towel. He was then taken away by someone else. We don't know what happened to him.

I hope he's ok.





Haiti Quake: Death toll May Be 200,000, US General Says


The leading US general in Haiti has said it is a "reasonable assumption" that up to 200,000 people may have died in last Tuesday's earthquake.

Lt Gen Ken Keen said the disaster was of "epic proportions", but it was "too early to know" the full human cost.

Rescuers pulled more people alive from the rubble at the weekend, but at least 70,000 people have already had burials.

Relief efforts are being slowed by bottlenecks, and many thousands of survivors are fending for themselves.

Many Haitians are trying to leave the devastated capital city, Port-au-Prince, and there are security concerns amid reports of looting and violence.

More than 2,000 US marines were expected to arrive in the region on Monday to bolster US troops and UN peacekeepers already on the ground.

In Brussels, European Union nations pledged more than 420m euros ($604m; £320m) from the EU budget to assist Haiti, with about half the sum dedicated to emergency and short-term aid.

At least 200m euros will be dedicated to funding medium- to long-term rebuilding efforts.

"We recognize that more aid and support is needed, and more has been agreed," EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton told reporters, adding that the EU was working closely with the United Nations, the US and others.

European ministers were also discussing deploying a security mission to help maintain law and order.

On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he would recommend that the UN Security Council boost police and troop numbers in Haiti by 3,500.

It came a day after he appealed to frustrated Haitians to be patient over efforts to bring them relief.

Gen Keen, running the US military relief effort, when asked about death toll estimates of between 150,000 and 200,000 people, said: "I think the international community is looking at those figures, and I think that's a start point.

"Clearly, this is a disaster of epic proportions, and we've got a lot of work ahead of us."

Hope for more rescues

Amid the chaos and destruction, a number of people were rescued from collapsed buildings at the weekend.

Among the lucky ones was a seven-year-old girl pulled alive from the ruins of a supermarket.

At the UN headquarters destroyed in the earthquake, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, just 15 minutes after the secretary general visited the site.

And US teams with search dogs also rescued a 16-year-old Dominican girl trapped for five days in a small, three-storey hotel.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said on Monday that American teams had pulled 10 people alive from the rubble the day before.

"According to rescue officials, this is the largest number of rescues in a single day in decades of earthquake search and rescue efforts," it said in a statement.

While hopes dim with every passing day, a South African rescue official, Colin Diner, told the BBC he hoped there would be more people found alive.

"What we are seeing is that the buildings have a whole lot of openings, collapsed voids and things, and that always gives you a better opportunity," he said.

UN humanitarian chief John Holmes told reporters on Monday that there were now 43 search and rescue teams on the ground, with 1,700 people involved in the effort.

"More than 70 people have been pulled from the wreckage in the last few days," he said, saying that efforts to find those trapped in the rubble would carry on until there was no longer hope of finding anyone alive.

He played down worries over security, saying that despite incidents of violence, the overall situation was one of calm.

Homeless throng streets

Correspondents say there is a sense of movement at last with the relief effort, although the amount of supplies getting through is still small.

The BBC's Mark Doyle says that in a slum community in the hills above Port-au-Prince, people have yet to see any government officials or aid workers.

They have camped out on waste ground and are fending for themselves, he says, pulling together to survive.

Meanwhile, our correspondent says, perhaps 5,000 people are lined up in the baking sun outside the US embassy, desperate to get visas to join relatives among the large Haitian-American community in the US.

Several agencies have complained about not being able to get aid through the airport in Port-au-Prince, which is heavily congested and has been taken over by the US military.

Medecins Sans Frontieres urged commanders to speed up the landing of planes carrying medical supplies, after one carrying an inflatable field hospital was turned away on Saturday night.

But Mr Holmes said that initial issues were now being resolved with the introduction through the World Food programme of a slot system to prioritise humanitarian flights.

The head of the US operation at the airport, Col Buck Elton, said on Sunday there had been 600 take-offs and landings since the US took control on Wednesday, and 50 flights had been diverted.

About 60% of the flights coming in were civilian and 40% military, he said.

US troops also said they had set up their first foothold outside the airport to deliver aid carried in by helicopters.

Port-au-Prince's port is badly damaged, and many roads are still blocked by corpses and debris, hampering the delivery of fuel and other supplies.

The Haitian and Dominican Republic governments are planning an alternative 130km (80 mile) humanitarian road corridor to deliver relief from the southern Dominican town of Barahona, the UN said.

Mr Holmes said the UN expected to resolve problems with bringing in fuel from the Dominican Republic in the next day or two.

The UN has launched an appeal for $562m (£346m) intended to help three million people for six months, most of whom are thought to need emergency relief.

The British government has said it will treble its aid to Haiti to £20m ($32m).



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Sources: AP, CNN, AC360, The Daily Beast, BBC News, Google Maps