Dad, child survive 13-floor fall
2010-02-28 23:50
Concepcion - A massive earthquake and tsunamis killed 350 people in the Chilean coastal town of Constitucion, pushing the total death toll higher on Sunday as the government tried to get aid to hungry survivors and halt looting.
President Michelle Bachelet said at least 708 people had been killed and called for calm as people desperate for food and water looted stores in some areas worst hit by Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the world's biggest in a century.
Television images showed cars tossed on top of shattered houses and boats lifted far from the waterfront in the coastal towns of Pelluhue and in Constitucion.
"It's an enormous catastrophe... there's a growing number of missing people," Bachelet said, adding that food and medical aid was being sent to help the roughly 2 million people affected by the quake.
The quake wrecked hundreds of thousands of homes, mangled highways and bridges and dealt a heavy blow to infrastructure in the world's top copper producer and one of Latin America's most stable economies.
A lack of water, food and fuel sharpened the hardship for the hundreds of thousands of people left homeless, and widespread disruption to the power supply threatened to hamper Chilean industry's recovery.
Hugged each other
In the hard-hit city of Concepcion, about 500km south of Santiago, about 60 people were feared to have been crushed to death in a collapsed apartment block where rescuers worked through the night to find survivors.
When their 13th-floor apartment began to shake, Alberto Rozas pulled his 7-year-old daughter into the bathroom doorway and waited for it to stop.
Instead, they fell.
Thirteen stories they plummeted, as their brand-new apartment building toppled like a felled tree, hugging each other all the way down.
Rozas had no idea which way was up until he looked through his apartment's shattered window and spotted light - "the light of the full moon".
Rozas and his daughter, Fernanda, clambered up and to safety with nothing more than a few cuts, scrapes and bruises.
"The earthquake and the fall were one single, horrible thing," Rozas told The Associated Press on Sunday. "I held onto her and she never let me go."
Rozas' neighbours who lived on the other side of the hall found themselves trapped beneath the structure, as rescuers painstakingly used electric saws and a generator-powered hammer to cut into the concrete.
Construction poor
"We don't have any listening devices or cameras," said Ian Argo, a fire fighter commander.
As of Sunday, 23 people had been pulled alive from the 15-story Rio Alta building and seven bodies had been removed. An estimated 60 people remained trapped inside on Sunday.
Socovil, the company that opened the concrete-and-glass structure last June, issued a statement saying it had complied with all building codes. But many residents were angry.
"The construction was obviously poor," Rozas said.
Abel Torres, 25, had a view of the Bio Bio River from his sixth-floor apartment. He had just gotten home from his job at a nightclub when the quake hit at 03:34.
"My TV fell on top of me and suddenly I saw stars shooting across my window," he said.
Torres and his room mate stacked furniture to reach that window - now a skylight - and escaped without clothes, coated in dust.
Only place spared
On the second floor, Maribel Alarcon and her husband Gunther rushed to comfort their 2-year-old son Oliver when he started crying moments before the tremor.
Their concern was their salvation: Oliver's bedroom was the only place spared in their apartment.
"We prayed a lot," Alarcon said. "And if God let us survive, that was because someone was going to rescue us."
Nine stories up, Rozas was sleeping alongside his daughter when the shaking began.
"There was dust, noise, everything falling," he said. "We went to the bathroom doorway. Then there was the fall. Finally it stopped."
After they climbed out of the wreckage, Rozas took Fernanda to her mother's house, then returned to help fire fighters understand the layout of the toppled building.
He retrieved medicine and clothes for Fernanda. And his own guitar.
The government imposed a curfew in Concepcion and the Maule region on Sunday in a bid to stop looting.
Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse a crowd of looters carrying off food and electrical appliances from one supermarket in Concepcion. Television images showed people stuffing groceries and other goods into shopping trolleys.
Hungry
"People have gone days without eating," said Orlando Salazar, one of the looters at the supermarket. "The only option is to come here and get stuff for ourselves."
Concepcion's mayor, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, said the situation was getting "out of control" due to shortages of basic supplies and called for troops to be sent to the city.
The quake poses a daunting reconstruction challenge for President-elect Sebastian Pinera, who takes office in two weeks.
Crushed cars, fallen power lines and rubble from wrecked buildings littered the streets of Concepcion, which has about 670 000 inhabitants and lies 115km south west of the quake's epicentre.
A string of strong aftershocks have rocked the country and thousands of Concepcion residents camped out in tents or makeshift shelters, fearing fresh tremors could topple weakened buildings.
Some economists predicted a deep impact on Chile's economy after the quake damaged its industrial and agricultural sectors in the worst-hit regions, possibly putting pressure on its currency.
The economic damage from the quake could be up to $30bn, equivalent to about 15% of gross domestic product, said Eqecat, a firm that helps insurers model catastrophe risks.
Chile's fourth-largest copper mine El Teniente, which accounts for more than 7% of national output, and the nearby Andina mine were due to resume operations on Sunday but analysts feared power outages could still curtail supplies.
There was no information available on Sunday on two Anglo-American mines where power outages have halted production.
State television said Santiago's airport had started to receive international flights for the first time since the quake struck.
The quake triggered tsunamis as far afield as Japan and Russia, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or serious damage.