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2/27/2010 - Chile struck by one of strongest earthquakes ever
TALCA, Chile – One of the largest earthquakes ever recorded tore apart houses, bridges and highways in central Chile on Saturday and sent a tsunami racing halfway around the world. Chileans near the epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant, and authorities said at least 214 people were dead.
The magnitude-8.8 quake was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil — 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) to the east. The full extent of damage remained unclear as dozens of aftershocks — one nearly as powerful as Haiti's devastating Jan. 12 earthquake — shuddered across the disaster-prone Andean nation.
President Michelle Bachelet declared a "state of catastrophe" in central Chile but said the government had not asked for assistance from other countries. If it does, President Barack Obama said, the United States "will be there." Around the world, leaders echoed his sentiment.
In Chile, 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, and complicated efforts to reach quake-damaged areas by road.
At least 214 people were killed and 15 were missing as of Sunday evening, Bachelet said in a national address on television. She said 1.5 million people had been affected, and officials in her administration said 500,000 homes were severely damaged.
In Talca, just 65 miles (105 kilometers) from the epicenter, people sleeping in bed suddenly felt like they were flying through major airplane turbulence as their belongings cascaded around them from the shuddering walls at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. EST, 0634 GMT).
A deafening roar rose from the convulsing earth as buildings groaned and clattered. The sound of screams was confused with the crash of plates and windows.
Then the earth stilled, silence returned and a smell of damp dust rose in the streets, where stunned survivors took refuge.
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 (meters) away.
Also near the epicenter was Concepcion, one of the country's largest cities, where a 15-story building collapsed, leaving a few floors intact.
"I was on the 8th 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."
Chilean state television reported that 209 inmates escaped from prison in the city of Chillan, near the epicenter, after a fire broke out.
In the capital of Santiago, 200 miles (325 kilometers) to the northeast, 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.
A car dangled from a collapsed overpass while overturned vehicles lay scattered below. "I can now say in all surety that seat belts save lives in automobiles," said Cristian Alcaino, who survived the fall in his car.
While most modern buildings survived, a bell tower collapsed on the Nuestra Senora de la Providencia church and several hospitals were evacuated due to damage.
Santiago's airport was closed, with smashed windows, partially collapsed ceilings and destroyed pedestrian walkways in the passenger terminals. The capital's subway was shut as well, and transportation was further limited because hundreds of buses were stuck behind a damaged bridge.
Chile's main seaport, in Valparaiso about 75 miles (120 kilometers) from Santiago, was ordered closed while damage was assessed. Two oil refineries shut down, and lines of cars snaked out of service stations across the country as nervous drivers rushed to fill up.
The state-run Codelco, the world's largest copper producer, halted work at two of its mines, although it said it expected them to resume operations quickly, the newspaper La Tercera reported.
President-elect Sebastian Pinera angrily reported seeing some looting while flying over damaged areas. He vowed "to fight with maximum energy looting attempts that I saw with my own eyes."
The jolt set off a tsunami that swamped San Juan Bautista village on Robinson Crusoe Island off Chile, killing at least five people and leaving 11 missing, said Guillermo de la Masa, head of the government emergency bureau for the Valparaiso region. He said the huge waves also damaged several government buildings on the island.
Pedro Forteza, a pilot who frequently flies to the island, said, "The village was destroyed by the waves, including the historic cemetery. I would say that 20 or 30 percent has disappeared."
On the mainland, several huge waves inundated part of the major port city of Talcahuano, near the hard-hit city of Concepcion. A large boat was swept more than a block inland. Pinera flew over the area and said an unspecified number of people had died in Talacahuano.
Waves also flooded hundreds of houses in the town of Vichato, in the BioBio region.
The surge of water raced across the Pacific, setting off alarm sirens in Hawaii, Polynesia and Tonga and prompting warnings across all 53 nations ringing the vast ocean.
Tsunami waves washed across Hawaii, where little damage was reported. The U.S. Navy moved a half-dozen vessels out of Pearl Harbor as a precaution, Navy spokesman Lt. Myers Vasquez said. Shore-side Hilo International Airport was closed. In California, officials said a 3-foot (1-meter) surge in Ventura Harbor pulled loose several navigational buoys.
About 13 million people live in the area where shaking was strong to severe, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. USGS geophysicist Robert Williams said the Chilean quake was hundreds of times more powerful than Haiti's magnitude-7 quake, though it was deeper and cost far fewer lives.
More than 50 aftershocks topped magnitude 5, including one of magnitude 6.9.
A tremor 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 quake was unrelated to Chile's disaster.
The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile on May 22, 1960. The magnitude-9.5 quake killed 1,655 people and left 2 million homeless. It caused a tsunami that killed people in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines and caused damage along the west coast of the United States.
Saturday's quake matched a 1906 temblor off the Ecuadorean coast as the seventh-strongest ever recorded in the world.
Associated Press writer Roberto Candia reported this story from Talca and Eva Vergara from Santiago. AP writers Eduardo Gallardo in Santiago and Sandy Kozel in Washington contributed to this report.
The world's strongest earthquakes
Here is a list of earthquakes that registered at least magnitude 8.6.
• May 22, 1960: A magnitude 9.5 earthquake in southern Chile and ensuing tsunami killed at least 1,716 people.
• March 27, 1964: A magnitude 9.2 quake in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and ensuing tsunami killed 128 people.
• Dec. 26, 2004: A magnitude 9.1 quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami that killed 226,000 people in 12 countries, including 165,700 in Indonesia and 35,400 in Sri Lanka.
• Aug. 13, 1868: A magnitude 9.0 quake in Arica, Peru (now Chile) generated catastrophic tsunamis; more than 25,000 people were killed in South America.
• Jan. 26, 1700: A magnitude 9.0 quake shakes Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Colombia and triggers tsunami that damages villages in Japan.
• Nov. 4, 1952: A magnitude 9.0 quake in Kamchatka causes damage but no reported deaths, despite setting off 30-foot (9.1-meter) waves in Hawaii.
• Jan. 31, 1906: A magnitude 8.8 quake off the coast of Ecuador and Colombia generated a tsunami that killed at least 500 people.
• Feb. 27, 2010: A magnitude 8.8 quake off the coast of Chile killed a still-undetermined number of people and sends a tsunami across the Pacific.
• Nov. 1, 1755: A magnitude 8.7 quake and ensuing tsunami in Lisbon, Portugal killed an estimated 60,000 people and destroyed much of Lisbon.
• July 8, 1730: A magnitude 8.7 quake in Valparasio, Chile, killed at least 3,000 people.
• Aug. 15, 1950: A magnitude 8.6 earthquake in Assam, Tibet, killed at least 780 people.
• March 28, 2005: A magnitude 8.6 quake in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, kills about 1,300 people.
Sources: U.S. Geological Survey, Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology and WHO's International Disaster Database
Chile quake in 'elite class' like 2004 Asian quake
LOS ANGELES – The huge earthquake that struck off the coast of Chile belongs to an "elite class" of mega earthquakes, experts said, and is similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean temblor that triggered deadly tsunami waves.
The magnitude-8.8 quake was a type called a "megathrust," considered the most powerful earthquake on the planet. Megathrusts occur when one tectonic plate dives beneath another. Saturday's tremor unleashed about 50 gigatons of energy and broke about 250 miles of the fault zone, said U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Paul Caruso.
The quake's epicenter was offshore and occurred about 140 miles north of the largest earthquake ever recorded — a magnitude-9.5 that killed about 1,600 people in Chile and scores of others in the Pacific in 1960.
"It's part of an elite class of giant earthquakes," said USGS geologist Brian Atwater.
If the magnitude holds, it will tie with the 1906 offshore Ecuador quake as the fifth largest since 1900.
"We call them great earthquakes. Everybody else calls them horrible," said USGS geophysicist Ken Hudnut. "There's only a few in this league."
The Chile quake was smaller than the Sumatra quake of 2004, a magnitude-9.1 and was not expected to be anything nearly as destructive. That quake and ensuing tsunami killed 230,000 people. Another difference is that the Chile quake triggered tsunami warnings hours ahead of time in Hawaii and Pacific islands, allowing people time to flee to higher ground.
In 2004, there was little measuring technology in place to warn Indian Ocean countries about incoming killer waves.
So far, the quake death toll has surpassed 200. Several more died when tsunami waves swamped an island off the country's coast.
Chile is no stranger to violent jolts. In fact, USGS geophysicist Ross Stein called the country an "earthquake hatchery." Thirteen temblors of magnitude 7 or larger have hit Chile since 1973.
The latest quake took place at a boundary where two plates of the Earth's crust grind and dive. While that type of action gave rise to the Andes mountains that form the backbone of South America, it's also the source of some of the largest quakes.
The Chile temblor struck a day after a smaller earthquake shook the southern coast of Japan. Experts said the quakes appear to be unrelated.
There's also no connection between this quake and the disaster in Haiti, said University of Miami geology professor Tim Dixon.
A quake like the one that hit Haiti, a magnitude 7, happens somewhere in the world about every month, usually underwater. But the type that hit Chile is among the most powerful recorded in recent history.
The faults in Haiti and Chile are distant enough that stress from one would not affect the other, Dixon said.
AP writers Seth Borenstein in Washington and P. Solomon Banda in Denver contributed to this report.