Earthquake in Chile

Massive quake hits Chile, triggers tsunami
At least 214 dead; big waves splash ashore in Pacific countries

NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 8:41 p.m. CT, Sat., Feb. 27, 2010
SANTIAGO, 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 of the massive 8.8-magnitude quake were tossed about as if shaken by a giant, and the head of the emergency agency said authorities believed at least 300 people were dead.

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.

"It came in waves and lasted so long. Three minutes is an eternity. We kept worrying that it was getting stronger, like a terrifying Hollywood movie," said Santiago resident Dolores Cuevas.

"Unfortunately, Chile is a country of catastrophes," President-elect Sebastian Pinera said, adding the quake heavily damaged many of the country's roads, airports and ports.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a "state of catastrophe" in central Chile. Officials said about 1.5 million homes were damaged across the Andean nation.

Hours after the quake, smaller-than-expected tsunami waves hit Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific Coast. There were no immediate reports of damage and a tsunami warning for Hawaii was soon lifted.

Japan issued a warning on Sunday for a tsunami of 10 feet or higher and warned coastal residents to evacuate to higher ground.

At least 214 people were killed and 15 were missing as of Saturday evening, Bachelet said in a national address on television. While that remained the official estimate, Carmen Fernandez, head of the National Emergency Agency, said later: “We think the real figure tops 300. And we believe this will continue to grow.”

Bachelet also said 1.5 million people had been affected by the quake, and officials in her administration said 500,000 homes were severely damaged.

Dozens of aftershocks
Local radio reported 100 people were missing in a collapsed building in hard-hit Concepcion, one of Chile's largest cities with around 670,000 inhabitants. Firefighters rushed to put out fires, and most of the buildings in the city center were destroyed.

At least five people were killed by huge earthquake-triggered waves that smashed into Chile's Robinson Crusoe Island, named for the fictional, stranded sailor.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 56 miles northeast of the city of Concepcion at a depth of 22 miles at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. ET). The quake shook buildings in Argentina's capital of Buenos Aires, and was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil — 1,800 miles to the east.

More than 60 aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater were reported in the hours after the quake.

An earthquake 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 temblor was a separate, "triggered earthquake" caused by ground waves from the Chilean quake.

Blazing buildings
A 15-story building collapsed in Concepcion, where buildings caught fire, bridges collapsed and cracks opened up in the streets. Concepcion's city hall also collapsed, according to radio reports.

"I was on the eighth 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."

Upside-down cars lay scattered on a damaged highway bridge. Some residents looted pharmacies and a collapsed grain silo, hauling off bags of wheat, television images showed.

More than 200 inmates in a prison near Concepcion escaped when walls crumbled, Terra Networks reported.

In the town of Talca, 65 miles from the epicenter, people were jostled from bed as their belongings cascaded around them from the shuddering walls.

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 away.

In the capital of Santiago, 200 miles northeast of the epicenter, a car dangled from a collapsed overpass, 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.

“I saw how the cars fell off and I didn’t know what to do. I was alone here,” said Mario Riveros, a security guard at a factory in Santiago, as he stood next to a bridge that had fallen, according to La Segunda newspaper. “ I felt like crying.”

Three hospitals in Santiago collapsed, and a dozen more south of the capital also suffered significant damage, a health official said.

Tsunami warnings
The jolt set off a tsunami that raced across the Pacific, setting off alarm sirens in Hawaii, Polynesia and Tonga. Tahitian officials banned all traffic on roads less than 1,600 feet from the sea and people in several low-lying island nations were urged to find higher ground.

Tidal surges of up to 7 feet hit some Hawaiian islands Saturday afternoon but there were no reports of damage or injuries. In southern California, a tidal surge swept away most of the navigational buoys in Ventura's harbor but no boats sank, officials reported.

Tsunami waves were also likely to hit Asian, Australian and New Zealand shores within 24 hours of the quake.

On the island of Robinson Crusoe, a huge tsunami wave flooded the village of San Juan Batista, 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."

Bachelet said residents were evacuated from coastal areas of Chile's remote Easter Island, a popular tourist destination in the Pacific famous for its towering stone statues.

In the mainland coastal town of Vichato, in the BioBio region, waves flooded hundreds of houses. Tsunami waves also swept into the port town of Talcahuano, causing serious damage to port facilities and lifting fishing boats out of the water, local television reported.

ADN Radio reported many beach towns were wiped out, including Matanzas, a wind- and kite-surfing destination that attracts many foreigners.

It’s summer in South America and hundreds of thousands of people were vacationing at the beaches or starting to pack up to get back to work or school next week.

'Houses were really shaking'
Santiago's international airport was closed as the quake destroyed passenger walkways and shook glass out of doors and windows.

Simon Shalders, who lives in Santiago, told Sky News: "There was a lot of movement. The houses were really shaking, walls were moving backwards and forwards, and doors were swinging open.

"Santiago has got a history of earthquakes and basically there's not a lot of old construction in Santiago because of these earthquakes.

"The new buildings in Santiago are designed to withstand fairly strong quakes and they probably held up pretty well."

Sylvia Dostal of Keizer, Ore., said she was on the 23rd floor of the Marriott Hotel on President Kennedy Avenue in Santiago when the quake struck. "I had been in earthquakes before, including the San Francisco Loma Prieta quake, but this was different. The building was swaying AND moving up and down!" she wrote to msnbc.com.

"We made our way to the emergency stairs, since elevators were out of the question. There were children, babies and parents all in bathrobes and nightwear gathering outside the building," she wrote.

There were blackouts in parts of Santiago and communications were still down in the area closest to the epicenter.

Santiago resident Leo Perioto told CNN that "windows were wobbling a lot" in his six-story building.

"The whole building was shaking," he added. "We could feel the walls moving from side to side."

Early Olympics homecoming
A Chilean skier decided to participate in Sunday's closing ceremonies at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, upon learning her family and friends escaped injury in the massive earthquake that struck her homeland.

Noelle Barahona had planned on returning home Saturday, but she could not get a flight. Instead, she will remain in the athlete's village in Vancouver, team spokesman Luis Alberto Santa Cruz said.

Chile brought three alpine skiers to the games. Two had already left Vancouver.

Scientists say the quake was a "megathrust" — similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean temblor that spawned a catastrophic tsunami.

Megathrust earthquakes occur in subduction zones where plates of the Earth's crust grind and dive. Saturday's jolt occurred when the Nazca plate dove beneath the South American plate, releasing tremendous energy.

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause "tremendous damage," according to the USGS said. The quake that devastated Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 was rated magnitude 7.

In 1960, Chile was hit by the world's biggest earthquake since records dating back to 1900. The 9.5-magnitude quake devastated the south-central city of Valdivia, killing more than 1,600 people and sending a tsunami that battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile's Pacific coast and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

Wasn't the 9.5 the one that killed over a thousand people in Japan?

And I notice almost no mention in the papers of the 6.9 in Japan that hit a day earlier than the 8.8.

AFAIK, Japan has never had an earthquake over 8.0 magnitude. The massive damage and loss of life they are famous for historically has been caused by fire, just like San Francisco.

Point of interest, until yesterday, Chile had suffered 6 of the top 21 most powerful earthquakes of all time. We need to adjust that list once again, to 7 out of 22. And yet, Chile is still woefully unprepared for these things. Not due to lack of concern or will, but as evidence of the immense cost of rebuilding an entire country using the latest and most expensive materials and techniques. So far, Japan is the only nation to even try. And that is also why a 6.9 in Japan just isn't newsworthy anymore, it's well within their "flexibility" range.

K.

Hi all

Orc is not in the mood for pouring gasoline or water on anyone's favorite pet fire but
Orc has to note:

Chile suffers 8.8 magnitude Earthquake, last figure I saw said 700 people are dead. That is very sad. 700 unique, irreplaceable, individuals, all with potential to be someone great or do something good are gone.

A little over a month Haiti suffered a 7.7 (please correct Orc if number is wrong). Last numbers Orc heard said 250,000 people are dead. Again very said. Impossibly sad. Every one of those people was someone to someone.

Orc's point: Something is different between the way Chile and Haiti do things.

The earthquake measuring scale is not linear (it might be logarythim but Orc would be lying if he said so for sure).

A 8.8 earthquake is not a 1.1 earthquake worse than a 7.7 earthquake.

Orc think (if Orc remembers correctly - and no guarantees there) that each whole number indicates twice as much energy. So a 7.0 Earthquake is only half as bad an 8.0.

Why the difference? Orc is forced to suggest that Chile learned from last quake and instituted some rational building codes, possibly after consulting with Japanese and Californian engineers (who else knows Earthquakes quite as well as those two bunches of people - crazy madness living in Earthquakes alleys).

Haiti apparently did not.

Obvious difference Haiti is poor country in the Carribean, no big exports, only big money earner is tourism. Big population and a history of governments that can be politely be described as less than sane.

Chile is not exactly the finest example of Latin American First World utopias. They do have some mineral exports (and if Orc remembers correctly) made a real bundle out of Europeans export guano until the guano ran out. They've had their fair share of less than totally rational governments but they have tried to keep those to a minimum.

Orc strongly believes that the international money that is being supplied to Haiti for reconstruction HAS TO come with the condition that they will consult with the best people on teh planet to prevent this scale of tragedy from happening again.

Orc's vote doesn't count here because the government of Orc's country hasn't even noticed that Haiti or Chile even exist, and the members of said government are too busy getting lucrative government contracts without regular or transparent tender processes.

Someone has to say something. Unfortunately, perhaps because of Mr. Robinson's ill-advised comments, critising the Haitian government seems to be very unPC right now.

If we (the world) don't fix this now it will happen again.

In other parts of the world if 250,000 died due to government or civil negligence (deliberate or otherwise) it is called murder or manslaughter and people get tried.

Anyway, Orc's opinion, only Orc's opinions, no one else, nothing else beside opinions.

Regards
Deeply saddened Orc :-(

An earthquake in Chile killed a thousand Japanese sometime because of a tsunmani. I am wondering if it was the 9.5 or another big quake in South America.

Yeah, Chile has many large earthquakes and has a building code meant to stop the worst devastation. Haiti hasn't been struck with a huge quake in a long time and so they weren't expecting it.

It is like the big quakes that hit the east coast of the US. If we got another like the one in the early 1800's (1814?), the destruction may well be into the tens of billions and thousands of lives. We don't have buildings built for quakes like the west coast.

I found this by accident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale

It will help show you how much energy was released.

This is interesting, if faintly worrisome. What we have here is a sequence of mid-to-major quakes around the world, stretching over a period of about 5 months now. The last time we had this sequence, it ran from late 1904 to the summer of 1906, and included massive quakes in Chile, the Caribbean, Italy (with volcanic chaser) and the San Francisco Quake in April 1906.

So a question for the community members--you do have your disaster plans set, right? Evacuation bag, route of travel, a supply of canned food and clean water, etc?

Large box of MREs, and water purification pills, check :yes

Though I'd hate for any large scale disasters to brake out. I'd hate to have to pick up any of you from a raft or roof of your house etc. Be a terrible way to meet.

Don't forget the waterproof chest for books!

Orc, you also have to look at *where* and *how* the quakes struck.

Port-au-Prince sits on relatively soft hillside sediment, whereas the Chilean quake struck through bedrock. The softer the ground, the more it amplifies the quake. This principle is one of the factors that played into the collapse of part of the Nimitz Freeway during the '89 quake that struck near Santa Cruz, CA. The sections that collapsed were built over noncompacted landfill. Sections of the freeway structure built atop solid bedrock did just fine.

The fault near Haiti is a strike-slip fault, where the plates grind side to side. -><- In the Chilean quake ("megalift"), the plates slid one under the other ^v. Different "breeds" of quakes altogether.

The quake in Haiti hit closer to the surface ~ 8 miles down, practically on top of (er... underneath) the capital. The quake in Chile rumbled from about 20 miles down, 200 miles from major population centers.

The Richter scale is logarithmic -- an 8.8 quake is 500-900 times more powerful than a 7.

So, it was more than just a lack of up-to-date building codes and government ineptitude that contributed to the tragedy in Haiti.

Hi all and especially RobJN

RobJN you make very good points. I read an analysis comparing the two quakes and realized what an idiot I had been.

I am certain (from yours and other descriptions) that the geography around Port-au-Prince played a big role in the quake's lethality.

Is it the whole story? I don't know. The seismologists and engineers will probably still be arguing about when the next big one hits.

Accordng to http://alternityrpg.net/onlineforums/index...E=02&f=1&t=8726

the area is not unfamiliar with earthquakes. Puerto Rico (just south) has suffered quakes registering 7.0 in 1670, 1787, 1831, 1844, 1846, 1865, 1867, 1875, 1890, 1906, 1918, 1943 and 1946. The 1867,1918 and 1946 earthquakes also produced tsunamis.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...uake-red-cross/

says it is the most powerful quake in the region in 200 years.

Obviously this part of Caribbean is not even a Los Angeles in earth quake frequencies but they are obviously not unknown or unexpected.

When you know you live in an earthquake area (and that a neighboring island not to far away has suffered 13 quakes of 7.0 or more magnitude in the last 340 years) you should be thinking building codes. Or maybe siting your capital city somewhere else. Or at least having a few extra supplies on hand for when things to (quite literally) go sideways.

Maybe the Haitian economy is just small and anemic that matters like thinking about an earthquake that might happen tomorrow is not as important as keeping people fed today.

But it really does strike me as a situation where an ounce of prevention might have prevents pounds and pounds of grief. That ounce could have come from bright Californians who thought 'hey Haiti is not a good place to have a 7.0 earthquake, what can I do to try help that out. It would be a REAL disaster if they got hit by one'. It could have come bright Japanese person thinking 'Haiti isn't prepared for dealing with 1.1 earthquake, let alone a serious quake. I could give them some real useful advice.'

The West, and particularly the US and Japan pour billions (maybe even trillions) of aid dollars into the Third world every year. Not one dollar of that money seems to have ended up helping the Haitians being prepared for what was an inevitable, when-not-if disaster.

Most aid money is spent without supervision by governments whose priorities were flaky to start with. And when it does get spent with conditions or toward a particular goal it is hamstrung by local officials who don't want to lose control, or power or money, or the chance to get a bit more graft. Fighting malaria in East Africa is certainly important but right now, today, it looks like small potatoes compared with the carnage in Haiti.


The death toll seems to have stopped go up after the 250K mark. Other counties, western countries, go hysterical when half a dozen people die from Swine Flu. We bury our dead in thousand dollar caskets, in grave sites that will cost thousands of dollar to maintain for the twenty to forty years that the body will lie there not decomposing because its been preserved in a way that would make the Egyptian mummifying priesthood drool with envy. Meanwhile the Haitian dead might get the dignity of a mass grave, if they're lucky.


Maybe Orc is merely being human, trying to find some one to blame besides an (apparently ) uncaring God.

For the record Orc lives in (probably) the most geologically stable part of the world. Except for the routine minor quakes generated by blasting dense rock at depths of 5 kms in pursuit of minute traces of a relative worthless metal we don't get quakes. The last 'big' one here was (if I remember correctly) 4.6, and that happened a thousand kilometers away. We felt like it was a supersonic jet going overhead too low, or like living too close to a railway siding when a freight train rumbles through.

A few people near the epicenter died, at least one it turned out from a heart attack. A few buildings needed repairs. Heck there weren't even any reported deaths in South Africas slums, which make the Haitian slums look like pretty sound structures (well before the Haitian slums got leveled by the quake - right now they look like a South African slum ten minutes after the local muncipality tried to evict the locals again - South African muncipalities take the Red Army approach to slum clearing, bulldozers and people with sticks). But it was a major country-wide tragedy that took weeks to
shuffle off the TV news.

Sorry to all, Orc is currently sickened by mortality and frailness of human life. We all spend some much time chasing things that we don't need, or shouldn't need and not enough time making time for the things that count.

Regards
Orc