An earthquake registering 8.8 magnitude struck Chile before dawn yesterday, killing at least 300 people, severing the country’s main highway and damaging 1.5 million homes.
Tsunami warnings were issued across the Pacific Ocean as far as Alaska, Japan and New Zealand and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet declared a “state of catastrophe.” She said in a televised address yesterday about 2 million people have been affected by the earthquake, which the U.S. Geological Service said is the world’s fifth strongest since 1900.
The pre-dawn quake was centered 200 miles (317 kilometers) southwest of the capital Santiago near the main winemaking region and close to Concepcion, a metropolitan region of over 500,000 people. The total economic damage may be as much as $30 billion, or about 15 percent of the South American country’s gross domestic product, according to estimates by catastrophe modeling company Eqecat Inc.
“It’s much worse than I thought it would be,” Public Works Minister Sergio Bitar told reporters. “It’s not something we can solve quickly. This will take several months.” More than 50 aftershocks following the earthquake, which was stronger than the one in Haiti last month that may have killed 300,000, the USGS reported. The latest death toll from the Chile quake was estimated to exceed 300, up from an earlier forecast of 214, Carmen Fernandez, the director of the country’s national emergency agency told TVN.
Severed Highway The 90-second temblor severed the Panamerican highway, the country’s main thoroughfare, at several points south of Santiago. Bridges collapsed and embankments have subsided, rendering long sections of asphalt impassable.
An estimated 1.5 million homes may have been damaged, a third of them severely, Housing Minister Patricia Poblete said.
“We are talking almost about a cataclysm,” Poblete said in remarks broadcast on TVN.
The worst problems are near the epicenter of the earthquake close to Parral, more than 300 kilometers from Santiago.
Cars headed north toward the capital were sitting stationary in long columns threading their way through the vineyards and fruit orchards of Chile’s central valley as Bitar and Defense Minister Francisco Vidal flew overhead in an army helicopter to inspect the damage. The army may send two field hospitals to the south of Chile, Vidal said.
The tower of the pink church at Pelequen, a place of pilgrimage 130 kilometers south of Santiago, was gone and the roofs of several colonial-style houses had collapsed.
Presidential Palace In Santiago, the facade of the fine arts museum collapsed and Bitar said there was damage to part of the La Moneda presidential palace.
Bachelet spent yesterday morning answering phones and huddling with the ministers in the control center of the National Emergency Office in Santiago before boarding a helicopter to Talca.
President-elect Sebastian Pinera, who is to be sworn into office on March 11, said he inspected the damaged area and vowed to reassign plan spending to finance reconstruction.
Television images showed collapsed buildings across Concepcion. Rescue workers with specially trained dogs searched the rubble of a 14-story apartment building that toppled onto one side, following the screams of victims trapped inside, TVN reported.
Rescue workers pulled at least 22 people alive from the building.
In towns closer to the epicenter, including Curico and Talca, more than 80 percent of buildings were flattened, CHV Television reported.
Tsunami Alert A tsunami alert remained in effect along the Pacific Rim as far north as Alaska, 8,000 miles (12,874 kilometers) from the epicenter, even after the National Weather Service lifted its warning for Hawaii. Government forecasters earlier warned of “widespread damage” as a result of the tidal surge.
No damage was reported after waves began hitting the coastline of the Hawaiian Islands around noon Honolulu time (5 p.m. eastern time) yesterday.
The temblor struck at 3:34 a.m. offshore from the province of Maule at a depth of 22 miles (35 kilometers), according to the USGS Web site. It carried a force 500 times stronger than the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that last month devastated Haiti, according to the USGS.
Five people died and 11 are missing after a tsunami struck the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 420 miles west of the city of Valparaiso on Chile’s coast, according to images broadcast by TVN, while a sea surge reached the central plaza of port city Talcahuano, near Conception, leaving boats stranded in streets.
‘A Galloping Horse’ “We literally bounced around the room,” Patricia Bustamante, 61, said from the emergency room at the Salvador hospital in Santiago where her daughter was being treated for multiple concussions. “I’ve been through the earthquakes of 1960, 1971 and 1985 and this one felt different. It was like a galloping horse.” Stringent building codes and the most highly-engineered building inventory in Latin America helped mitigate damage, Boston-based Air Worldwide, a catastrophe modeling firm that estimates damages for insurers, said in a press release.
Power and phone connections were disrupted and Santiago residents waited in the street amid fears of aftershocks. Rescue workers pulled a 92-year-old woman out of a collapsed home, TVN reported. Chilectra, the electric utility for the Chilean capital of Santiago, said electricity has been restored to 80 percent of the city’s homes and businesses.
Copper Mines At least four copper mines responsible for 16 percent of the country’s output halted operations after the quake struck. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer.
Codelco’s El Teniente and Andina mine in central Chile will reopen “shortly” after inspectors failed to find major damage, Mining Minister Santiago Gonzalez said without providing a timetable for them to restart.
Most of Chile’s copper deposits and port facilities are located in the northern half of the country and had no reports of damage. These include Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, operated by BHP Billiton Ltd. and in which Rio Tinto Group is a shareholder.
Lan Airlines SA, Latin America’s biggest carrier by market value and which is partly owned by the billionaire Pinera, diverted 17 flights after the Santiago airport closed because of damage. It is expected to remain closed for at least 24 hours, according to airport chief Eduardo del Canto.
“The terminal is completely inoperable,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to arrive March 1 in Santiago on a regional tour. President Barack Obama, in a phone call with Bachelet, said the U.S. stands ready to assist Chilean rescue and recovery efforts.
Economic Cost While Chile “has considerable assets of its own,” the U.S. has put together a disaster response team and has placed two urban search and rescue teams on alert, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in a statement.
Finance Minister Andres Velasco said it was too early to estimate the economic cost of the quake. He said the Chile’s policy of funneling windfall copper profits into a $14.7 billion rainy-day fiscal savings fund would help shoulder the cost of rebuilding.
“Chile has saved for a very long time in order to have the savings to be able to face situations like this,” he told reporters.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said his organization is monitoring the situation. The UN is on standby to provide emergency relief, the organization said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.
Chile is accustomed to earthquakes and boasts South America’s most seismically-safe infrastructure.
It was struck by the most powerful earthquake on record in 1960, when a magnitude 9.5 temblor killed about 1,655 people, according to the USGS Web site. A further 211 people died when associated tsunamis struck Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.
For Related News and Information: Top Latin America news: TOPL Top general news: TOP GEN News alerts on earthquakes: STNI QUAKENLRT Most-read commodity stories: MNI CMD Emerging Markets Market View: EMMV News on Codelco: 1006Z CI CN Metals Prices: METL London Metal Exchange: LME —With assistance from Eduardo Thomson in Santiago, Matthew Craze on Easter Island, Mike Millard and Shiyin Chen in Singapore, Alan Bjerga in Washington, Steven Bodzin in Caracas, Paul Tobin in Madrid, Fred Pals in Amsterdam and Mike Harrison, Simon Clark and Philip Sanders in London. Editors: Brendan Walsh, Joshua Goodman To contact the reporters on this story: Sebastian Boyd in Santiago at +56-2-487-4013 or sboyd9@bloomberg.net; Michael Smith in Santiago at +56-2-487-4009 or mssmith@bloomberg.net; James Attwood in Santiago at +56-2-487-4019 or jattwood3@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at +55-21-2125-2535 or jgoodman19@bloomberg.net; Mike Millard at +65-6212-1519 or mmillard2@bloomberg.net
