WHEN CHILE in 1960 was hit by the largest earthquake on record – 9.5 on the Richter scale – some 2,000 died across the country and hundreds more across the Pacific fell victim to the tsunami that followed. As far away as Japan, about a day after the quake, it killed 185 people and destroyed 1,600 homes. Fifty years later, Saturday’s 8.8-level quake, the world’s fifth biggest since 1900, claimed at least 700 lives in Chile and displaced 1.5 million people. It took place in the same fault zone where the Nazca tectonic plate, under the eastern Pacific south of the equator, slides beneath another piece of the earth’s crust, the South American plate. The two converge at about three and a half inches a year.
The 1960 quake increased stresses on adjacent parts of the fault line, including the area where the quake occurred on Saturday. Although there were smaller tremors in the area in the last five decades, none was large enough to relieve the strain which continued to build as the two plates converged.
But to a large extent the experience of 1960 has been taken on board by Chile and the lower death toll today, although tragic, is in sharp contrast to the catastrophe in Haiti six weeks ago where up to 300,000 may have died. In part that is the product of stricter building regulations in place since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Valparaíso in 1985. And in part it is due to Chile’s relative wealth and the concentration of the poor in the slums of Haiti’s teeming capital Port au Prince. Such disasters may be “natural” in one sense, but their human impact is very much a product of the sort of society they devastate, a human, social construct.
In Haiti the 7.0-magnitude quake occurred only a few miles from the capital. On Saturday, although 250 to 350 times more powerful than Haiti’s, Chile’s earthquake was also deeper – at 30 kilometres – and located about 100 kilometres from the nearest town Chillan and 120 kilometres from its second city, Concepción.
Still it wreaked havoc, tearing apart bridges and motorways, toppling multi-storey blocks and starting fires, and battering the coast and nearby islands with giant deadly waves. Many are still feared trapped under fallen buildings. Thousands slept on the streets, fearful of aftershocks. Further across the Pacific, from American Samoa, Easter Island, Hawaii to Japan and Australia, tsunami alerts were sounded and evacuations ordered. But although waves of up to 1.5 metres were reported from as far away as the Russian far east, Japan and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, there were no reports of injuries or serious damage – unlike the Indian Ocean’s devastating tsunami of 2004. Predicting the scale of tsunamis remains an inexact science.
Chile’s challenge is now massive. The immediate task of rescuing the trapped and wounded and then of helping Chileans rebuild an estimated half a million homes as well as hundreds of buckled roads and collapsed bridges will severely tax this relatively rich economy. International help must be forthcoming, speedy and generous.