CHILE EARTHQUAKE:SANTIAGO – Chile's president Michelle Bachelet yesterday signed a decree giving over security to the military in the province of Concepción, where looters have pillaged supermarkets, petrol stations, pharmacies and banks.
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.
Across the Bio Bio river in San Pedro, others cleared out a shopping centre. A video store was set on fire, two ATMs 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 Concepción 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 Juan Schulmeyer, of Concepción’s seventh 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 yesterday from what seemed like the sixth 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 an 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, 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.
In the village of Reumen, a lorry slammed into a dangling pedestrian overpass and 40 tons of concrete and steel crunched the truck, covering Chile’s main highway with smashed grapes, tomatoes and cucumbers – one of several overpasses toppled along the highway. Truck driver Jaime Musso, 53, thought his truck was being buffeted by strong winds and by the time he saw the overpass hanging down over Highway 5 there was no chance of stopping, so he aimed for the spot where he thought he would cause the least damage and brought down the overpass onto his truck. He said he survived “by millimetres”.
As night fell yesterday, about a dozen men and children sat around a bonfire in the remains of their homes in Curico, a town 122 miles south of the capital, Santiago. “We were sleeping when we felt the quake, very strongly. I got up and went out the door. When I looked back my bed was covered in rubble,” said survivor Claudio Palma.
In the capital Santiago, 200 miles to the northeast of the epicentre, the national Fine Arts Museum was badly damaged and an apartment building’s two-storey car park pancaked, smashing about 50 cars.
Santiago’s airport was closed and its subway shut down. Chile’s main sea port, in Valparaiso, was ordered closed while damage was assessed. Two oil refineries shut down. The state-run Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, halted work at two of its mines, but said it expected them to resume operations quickly.
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.
On the mainland, several huge waves inundated part of the major port city of Talcahuano, near hard- hit Concepción. A large boat was swept more than a block inland.
State television showed scenes of devastation in coastal towns, where houses were blasted away by water, leaving scraps of wood and metal – and complaints of homeless quake victims that officials had not yet brought water or food. – (AP)