ON THE GROUND:Families use rubble to build a shelter next to ruins that might still topple, writes Jonathan Franklinin Santiago
ROSARIO DIAZ could not stop crying. Her daughter, Lourdes, is dead along with her month-old granddaughter. The entire family, all immigrants from neighbouring Peru, were trapped inside a building in Santiago that collapsed during Saturday’s pre-dawn earthquake.
As the two-minute long tremors tore apart the walls and ceilings, the Diaz family managed to climb through the wreckage and made it to the street in the Estacion Central neighbourhood of the Chilean capital. Then a hail of cement buried Lourdes and the baby alive. Desperate neighbours tore through the rubble. They found the mother breathing but mortally injured. The baby was already dead.
Now her husband Adan Saavedra stares at the walls. His left cheek is bandaged heavily and his family and house destroyed. As immigrants, they lived in older housing, an estimated 120 people packed into five homes, which today are so damaged by the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that they must be demolished.
“I came here to take care of my pregnant daughter,” said Rosario, who arrived in Chile from Peru a month ago. “And now she is dead.” On a nearby street corner, dozens of families dragged their mattresses out to sleep on the streets. They feared aftershocks would topple what remained of their homes. “No one brings us anything, we are stuck here,” said Daniel Garcia (28), another Peruvian immigrant who spent the night sleeping on the street with his family. They used wreckage to build a shelter.
Two blocks away, Liliana Caceres, also Peruvian, slept on the pavement on her sofa. “It is safer here on the street than inside there,” she said pointing to her apartment inside a three-storey cement building that now tilts heavily. “At any moment the whole building could come down.” Next to Caceres, children slept in a tent donated by neighbours. Surrounding the group were piles of clothes, canned fish and what little else the families were able to salvage from their humble home which they rented for €80 a month.
At sunrise yesterday, people went back into their homes to recover goods and food, but left quickly again at 8am, when a 6.3-magnitude aftershock hit the country, knocking down more buildings and further complicating rescue efforts.
Travel across much of the country was paralysed as the airports and bus terminals remained closed. Cracks 20m long zigzagged along major roads, opening up holes large enough to swallow a motorcycle.
Emergency workers fanned out from Santiago yesterday and headed south to a 600km-long stretch of the country where the majority of people have no access to food, water or electricity.
“Our biggest problem is in the Juan Fernandez region [the Robinson Crusoe Islands],” said Ivan de la Maza, regional governor of hard-hit Valparaiso. Ocean swells, estimated at 9m-high, demolished the coastal villages in the islands, which are more than 700km west of the mainland. Most residents were asleep when, at 6am on Saturday, huge ocean swells flooded the town. Rescue crews arrived and found the tsunami nearly erased whole villages as it churned houses and boats into mountains of debris, which were then pulled back into the Pacific. Aerial photographs gave the impression a huge rake had been pulled from shore to the ocean, leaving few fragments of the community intact and entire streets erased.
Inland, in the city of Concepción, firefighters searched for survivors in a collapsed building. A full 24 hours later, only 16 people had been taken out alive, and six bodies recovered. “The apartments are totally destroyed. You have to work with great caution,” said Paulo Klein, leading a group of specialists from Puerto Montt. “It’s very difficult working in the dark with aftershocks, and inside it’s complicated.” – (Guardian service)