Chile president: 708 dead in quake

People look at a collapsed building in Concepcion, Chile (AP)
12 April 2012

President Michelle Bachelet says that Chile's earthquake killed at least 708 people -- sharply increasing the known death toll.

The president told a news conference that the country faces "a catastrophe of such unthinkable magnitude that it will require a giant effort" for Chile to recover.

She spoke at a news conference after a six-hour meeting with aides and emergency officials coping with Saturday's magnitude-8.8 quake. Officials earlier said about 300 were known dead.

President Bachelet said a growing number of people were listed as missing and she signed a decree giving over security to the military in the province of Concepcion, where looters have pillaged supermarkets, petrol stations, pharmacies and banks.

A tsunami caused by the quake that swept across the Pacific killed several people on a Chilean island and devastated coastal communities near the epicentre, but caused little damage in other countries, after precautionary evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people. The tsunami warning was lifted a day after the earthquake.

Police said more than 100 people died in Concepcion, the largest city near the epicentre with more than 200,000 people. 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 quake tore apart houses, bridges and highways, and Chileans near the epicentre were thrown from their beds by the force of the mega-quake, which was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil -- 1,800 miles to the east.

The full extent of damage remained unclear. Ninety aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater shuddered across the disaster prone Andean nation within 24 hours of the initial quake. One was nearly as powerful as Haiti's devastating January 12 earthquake.

Robert Williams, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey, said the Chilean quake was hundreds of times more powerful than Haiti's magnitude-7 quake, though it was deeper and cost far fewer lives. The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile on May 22, 1960. The magnitude-9.5 quake killed 1,655 people and made 2 million homeless.

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