Chile quake death toll hits 708 amid looting chaos

CHILE’S president sent the army to help police attack looters yesterday and appealed for international help in the wake of an earthquake that shattered cities and killed at least 708 people.

President Michelle Bachelet announced the higher new death toll after a six-hour meeting with aides and emergency officials struggling to cope with one of the most powerful earthquakes in centuries.

“We face a catastrophe of such unthinkable magnitude that it will require a giant effort” for Chile to recover, Bachelet told a news conference at the presidential palace, which itself suffered minor cracks in Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 quake.

She said that a growing number of people were listed as missing and she signed a decree giving the military control over security in the province of Concepcion, where looters have pillaged supermarkets, gas stations, pharmacies and banks.

The president, who leaves office on March 11, also said the country would accept some of the offers of aid that have poured in from around the world. She said the country needs field hospitals and temporary bridges, water purification plants and damage assessment experts – as well as rescuers to help relieve workers who have been labouring frantically for more than a day.

Officials earlier had said about 300 were known dead, with 500,000 homes severely damaged.

A tsunami caused by the quake that swept across the Pacific killed several people on a Chilean island and devastated other coastal communities near the epicentre, but caused little damage in other countries.

Police said more than 100 people died in Concepcion, the largest city near the epicentre with more than 200,000 people. The university was among the buildings that caught fire around the city as gas and power lines snapped. Many streets were littered with rubble and inmates escaped from a nearby prison.

Police used water cannon and tear gas to scatter people who forced open the doors of the Lider supermarket in Concepcion, hauling away everything from diapers to dehydrated milk to a kitchen stove.

Across the Bio Bio River in San Pedro, others 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.

The largest building damaged in Concepcion was a newly opened 15-storey apartment that 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 4th Lt 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 11pm on 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.

“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,” said Paulo Klein, 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 with 12 other rescuers.

The quake tore apart houses, bridges and highways, and Chileans near the epicentre were thrown from their beds by the force of the mega-quake, which was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil – 1,800 miles (2,900km) to the east.

The full extent of damage remained unclear. Ninety aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater shuddered across the Andean nation within 24 hours of the initial quake. One was nearly as powerful as Haiti’s devastating January 12 earthquake.

Robert Williams, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey, said the quake was hundreds of times more powerful than Haiti’s magnitude-7 quake, though it was deeper and cost fewer lives.