A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 and shook Bolivia and northern Chile today, but there were no initial reports of damage, officials in Chile and the United States said.
"Its depth of focus is such that we probably won't have any damage. It's not in a heavily populated area. It's on the Chile, Bolivia border," said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey in Colorado.
The USGS measured the magnitude of the earthquake at 6.9. The University of Chile's Seismology Institute said the epicenter was 18 miles (40 km) southeast of the northern Chile resort town of San Pedro de Atacama, near the Bolivian border, and put the magnitude at 6.8. The quake, at 4.26pm (local time), was felt strongly in Tocopilla, about 900 miles (1,500 km) north of Chile's capital, Santiago.
"It was really strong with a lot of noise and lasted a long time. There was lots of panic and the lights went out," Jorge Peralta, a government official in Tocopilla, told Cooperativa radio.
"There were situations of alarm, but no damage has been reported," Carmen Fernandez, chief of civil protection for the National Emergency Office, told local radio.
Hernan Vargas at the National Emergency Office's regional headquarters in Antofagasta, a port city in northern Chile, said the earthquake lasted one minute and 20 seconds and that power went out briefly.
Spokespeople for US miner Phelps Dodge and Chile's state-owned copper mining giant Codelco said there were no work stoppages at any of their mines in the north of Chile.