MAYHEM:FEAR TURNED to desperation yesterday as hundreds of survivors fought over food and water in the cities worst affected by Chile's devastating earthquake at the weekend, which killed at least 700 people.
Chilean television showed police firing tear gas canisters and water cannon at a crowd in Concepción, Chile’s second-biggest city and the one closest to the epicentre of the 8.8 magnitude quake – one of the most powerful ever recorded.
The crowd smashed windows and clambered into a shop, dragging out sacks of rice, cartons of milk, bread and babies’ nappies.
Elsewhere, rescue workers tore through crashed masonry with shovels and sledgehammers, searching for survivors buried in the rubble of their homes. Some streets were littered with downed power lines, upturned cars and flattened traffic lights.
State television reported later yesterday that an additional 350 people had been killed in the southern fishing port of Constitución, which was also hit by a tsunami, bringing the total up from 400 to about 700.
President Michelle Bachelet put the death toll at 708. She said the catastrophe was “enormous . . . there are a growing number of people unaccounted for, and this figure probably will continue to grow”.
In the port of Talcahuano, the centre of Chile’s fishing industry, about 25 boats were washed into the city by powerful waves triggered by Saturday’s earthquake.
Rescue workers were trying to reach 60-80 people thought to be trapped in an apartment block which had crumbled.
Bridges collapsed, roads buckled and houses in coastal areas were reduced to matchsticks and mangled rubble. The government said two million people – one-eighth of the population – have been directly affected by the quake, and about half a million houses made uninhabitable.
Most of Chile’s copper mines, its biggest industry, were unaffected by the quake because they are in the north, but one of the country’s biggest ports was closed and wine regions suffered.
The government has not yet put a figure on the reconstruction effort, but it will pose a challenge for Sebastián Piñera, who is to be sworn in as president on March 11th. He has visited the affected areas. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)