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Chile earthquake: tsunami fears as death toll hits 147

27 February 2010 22:48 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. t least 147 have been killed and nearly a quarter of the globe put on urgent tsunami alert after one of the most powerful earthquakes of modern times hit South America, APA reports citing Telegraph.co.uk.

A tremor with a magnitude of 8.8 devastated large parts of southern Chile and sent huge waves racing at up to 400 miles an hour across the Pacific. Isolated ocean islands were reported to have suffered severe wave damage, and tsunami warnings were issued across a vast area stretching from Russia and Japan through to the Philippines and New Zealand.

In the Chilean capital, Santiago, some five million woke up to "hell" as the earthquake, which struck in the small hours of Saturday morning, collapsed tower blocks and bridges and swallowed cars as it ripped cracks in the roads. Rescue teams worked throughout the day to dig out people buried alive in the rubble.

The Chilean government, which declared a state of "national catastrophe", put the death toll at 147 people. But with large parts of the country cut off, that figure is expected to rise. There were also unconfirmed reports of tsunami-related deaths on the sparsely-populated Juan Fernandez islands, off Chile’s 2,700-mile long coastline. The archipelago, said to be the location that inspired Daniel Defoe’s castaway novel Robinson Crusoe, was right in the tsunami’s path and had little time to react to warnings.

"There is an enormous amount of damage (on the Juan Fernandez islands), but we don’t know exactly much, we are still evaluating it," said Chile’s president Michelle Bachelet, who appealed for calm as panic-stricken crowds in Santiago filled the streets in the middle of the night, many in their nightclothes.

The Chilean coastal town of Talca Juano was also hit by a wall of water which flooded streets. Other Pacific islands, including Easter Island and Hawaii, were put on emergency alert and organised partial evacuations of coastal communities. New Zealand issued an official warning of a wall of water up to 10 feet high, while in Hawaii, waves predicted to reach 16 feet were expected to arrive by 9pm British time.

Although the earthquake was nearly as powerful as the 9.2 magnitude tremor that triggered the Asian tsunami of 2004, in which around 200,000 people died, it was hoped that adequate early warnings would prevent a high death toll.

The earthquake struck at around 3.34am local time (6.43GMT). Its epicentre was a spot in the Pacific seabed around 75 miles from the Chilean coastal city of Concepcion, although the shock waves were powerful enough to be felt 1,000 miles away in Argentina. "We were in the living room, when suddenly the big lamp hanging from the ceiling started to move very fast making circles," said one Buenos Aires resident.