Chileans pick up pieces

Press, 6 March 1985, Page 10

Chileans pick up pieces

By

WILLIAM HEATH,

of the Associated Press (through NZPA) Santiago

Chileans buried their dead and cleaned up the debris of the country’s worst earthquake in two decades yesterday as after-shocks rippled repeatedly through the hard-hit central section of the ’quake-prone nation. The official death toll in Monday’s ’quake stood at 135, with 2000 injured. The Government’s secretarygeneral, Mr Francisco Cuadra, said that 4900 homes were destroyed and 21,000 damaged. The ’quake was Chile’s worst since May, 1965, when 460 lives were lost.

Mario Prado, chief of the University of Chile’s seismological service, said that the earthquake that struck the country’s most populous sectioa — inhabited by more than'half its 11 million citizens — registered 7.6 on the Richter scale and was followed by two more

strong shocks. After-shocks, many of which could be felt in Santiago’s tall buildings, had continued yesterday at the rate of two a minute, Mr Prado told a news conference. “But there are few possibilities that there will be another ’quake as strong as Sunday’s” (Monday N.Z.T.). Scientists had an idea that a strong ’quake was on its way, Mr Prado said, because their instruments registered 300 minor tremors during the two weeks preceding the ’quake. “The fact that there was not more structural damage is due to the fact that the construction is basically of low buildings,” he said. In Santiago and the twin Pacific coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, 120 km west of the capital, destruction was largely confined to old adobe and brick buildings. Most of the dead, officials said, had been killed by collapsing walls and brick

and stonework falling from buildings. The worst single ’quakerelated incident occurred at a Catholic church in San Bemardo, a Santiago suburb 16km from the city centre. There, five bodies were dug out from beneath the collapsed church facade and another five were believed still to be buried. Father Bernardo Herrera said that he was just finishing his sermon at evening Mass when the earthquake struck. “There were about 800 people in the congregation and I asked them to keep calm and went on with my sermon,” he said. “But some of the people started outside, while others moved closer to the front of the church. It’s too bad more didn’t stay inside because the facade fell on those who went out.”

Four other people were reported killed when the roof collapsed at a Methodist church in Valparaiso and four more died when a

theatre facade collapsed in Santiago. Among the towns and cities reporting the most serious damage were the 70,000-inhabitant port of San Antonio, 100 km west of Santiago, and Melipilla, a farm

town of 35,000 65km from the capital. The Government of General Augusto Pinochet ordered a midnight to 5 a.m. curfew throughout the affected zone to prevent looting. Hundreds of homeless faced the prospect of spending a second night in the open, sleeping on blankets and mattresses salvaged from damaged homes, although many were offered shelter in public schools. “We’d like to leave and go somewhere else,” said a woman, who with her four children was among 14 families camped outside a damaged two-storey tenement in Santiago. “We’re afraid that if we leave thieves will take what little we still have left inside.”