‘Pure luck’ limits death toll to six in Chilean quake
Larger seismic event long overdue in region
IQUIQUE, CHILE — Six people died, more than 2,000 homes were damaged, and it could cost millions of dollars to repair and replace sunken or damaged fishing boats.
Still, it was clear that the loss of life and property could have been much worse after the magnitude-8.2 earthquake that struck northern Chile on Tuesday night.
“How much is it luck? How much is it science? How much is it preparedness? It is a combination of all of the above,” said Costas Synolakis, an engineer who directs the Tsunami Research Center at the University of Southern California.
“I think what we just saw here is pure luck. Mostly, it is luck that the tsunami was not bigger and that it hit a fairly isolated area of Chile.”
It’s possible that in addition to the six reported deaths other people were killed in older adobe structures in remote communities, but it’s still a very low toll for such a powerful shift in the undersea fault that runs the length of South America’s Pacific coast.
The shaking that began at 8:46 p.m. Tuesday also touched off landslides that blocked roads, knocked out power for thousands, briefly closed regional airports and started fires that destroyed several businesses. About 2,500 homes were damaged in Alto Hospicio, a poor neighbourhood in the hills above Iquique, a city of nearly 200,000 people.
More adobe homes were destroyed in Arica, another city close to the quake’s offshore epicentre.
A mandatory evacuation — ahead of a tsunami that rose to only 2.5 metres — lasted for 10 hours in Iquique and Arica, the cities closest to the epicentre, and kept 900,000 people out of their homes along Chile’s 4,000-kilometre coastline.
Chile is one of the world’s most seismic countries because of the way the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera ever higher.
The country is particularly prone to tsunamis.
Bitter experience has led to the adoption of strict building codes, mandatory evacuations and worldleading emergency preparedness.
But Chileans weren’t satisfied Wednesday, finding much room for improvement.
Alberto Maturana, the former director of Chile’s Emergency Office, said Chileans were lucky the quake hadn’t caught them in the middle of the day when parents and children are separated, or in the middle of the night.
And he was highly critical of the government’s response, citing the need for better access to roads, transportation, health care, co-ordination and supplies.
An even bigger quake is long overdue in the region, seismologists warn.
“Could be tomorrow, could be in 50 years,” said Mark Simons, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology. “But the key point here is that this magnitude-8.2 is not the large earthquake that we were expecting for this area. We’re actually still expecting potentially an even larger earthquake.”
Nowhere along the fault is the pressure greater than in the “Iquique seismic gap” of northern Chile.
“This is the one remaining gap that hasn’t had an earthquake in the last 140 years,” Simons said.