Five dead as magnitude 8.2 quake hits northern Chile
Baku, April 2 (AZERTAC). A powerful magnitude-8.2 earthquake struck off northern Chile on Tuesday night, setting off a small tsunami that forced evacuations along the country`s entire Pacific coast. Five people were crushed to death or suffered fatal heart attacks, the interior minister said, but Chile apparently escaped major damage or serious casualties.
The shaking loosed landslides that blocked roads, power failed for thousands, an airport was damaged and several businesses caught fire. About 300 inmates escaped from a women`s prison in the city of Iquique, and Chile`s military was sending a planeload of special forces to help police guard against looting.
In the city of Arica, 86 miles (139 kilometers) from the quake`s epicenter, hospitals were treating minor injuries, and some homes made of adobe were destroyed and 90 percent of customers were without power, authorities said.
The quake also shook modern buildings in nearby Peru and in Bolivia`s high altitude capital of La Paz.
Hours later, a tsunami warning remained in effect for northern Chile, but alerts were lifted elsewhere.
“We regard the coast line of Chile as still dangerous, so we`re maintaining the warning,” geophysicist Gerard Fryer at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center told The Associated Press.
Chile`s Emergency Office said its tsunami watch would remain in effect for six more hours, meaning hundreds of thousands of people along the coast would not sleep in their beds. Swimmers and surfers in the U.S. state of Hawaii, thousands of miles away in the Pacific, might see higher waves Wednesday, the warning center said.
The quake was so strong that the shaking experienced in Bolivia`s capital about 290 miles (470 kilometers) away was the equivalent of a 4.5-magnitude tremor, authorities there said.
The latest activity began with a strong magnitude-6.7 quake on March 16 that caused more than 100,000 people to briefly evacuate low-lying areas. Hundreds of smaller quakes followed in the weeks since, keeping people on edge as scientists said there was no way to tell if the unusual string of tremors was a harbinger of an impending disaster.
The last recorded big quake to hit far northern Chile around Iquique was a devastating magnitude-8.3 in 1877. It unleashed a 24-meter-high (nearly 80-foot-high) tsunami, causing major damage along the Chile-Peru coast and fatalities as far away as Hawaii and Japan.
A magnitude-8.8 quake and ensuing tsunami in central Chile in 2010 killed more than 500 people, destroyed 220,000 homes, and washed away docks, riverfronts and seaside resorts. That quake released so much energy, it actually it shortened the Earth`s day by a fraction of a second by changing the planet's rotation.
The strongest earthquake ever recorded on Earth also happened in Chile — a magnitude-9.5 tremor in 1960 that killed more than 5,000 people.
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