Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Chile's 8.2 quake not 'the big one', expert warns

TVNZ

- ‎1 hour ago‎

Thousands of evacuated residents in Chile have been allowed to return to their homes, following yesterday's magnitude 8.2 earthquake.

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Chile's 8.2 quake not 'the big one', expert warns

updated 05:35 Published: 4:19AM Thursday April 03, 2014 Source: ONE News/ AP

Thousands of evacuated residents in Chile have been allowed to return to their homes, following yesterday's magnitude 8.2 earthquake.
The severe jolt left six people dead, triggered tsunami warnings and caused the evacuation of around 900,000 residents along the country's extensive coastline.
Waves as high as two metres were recorded after the quake, but the tsunami threat has since been lifted.
But Tuesday night's quake was not the big one seismologists expect eventually.
"Could be tomorrow, could be in 50 years; we do not know when it's going to occur. 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," said Mike Simons, a seismologist at the Geological Survey.
Chile is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries because just off the coast, the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera to ever-higher altitudes. Nowhere along this fault is the pressure greater than in far northern Chile, an area known as the "Iquique seismic gap".
President Michelle Bachelet arrived in Iquique before noon to review damage after declaring a state of emergency. Hours earlier, she sent a military plane with 100 anti-riot police to join 300 soldiers deployed to prevent looting and round up escaped prisoners.
Seawater flooded city streets and washed away some fishing boats in Iquique, but by early Wednesday no major tsunami damage was apparent. Chile's entire coast was initially subject to the mandatory evacuation order, which lasted nearly 10 hours in coastal communities closest to the offshore epicenter.
The shaking that began at 8.46pm Tuesday (local time) also touched off landslides that blocked roads, knocked out power for thousands, damaged an airport and started fires that destroyed several businesses. Some homes made of adobe were destroyed in Arica, another city close to the quake's offshore epicenter.
About 300 inmates escaped from a women's prison in the city of Iquique, forcing the closure of the border with Peru. Officials said some two dozen had been captured early Wednesday.

Bachelet, who just returned to the presidency three weeks ago, waited five hours after the quake struck to address her nation. It was not lost on many Chileans that the last time she presided over a major quake, days before the end of her 2006-10 term, her emergency preparedness office prematurely waved off a tsunami danger. Most of the 500 dead from that magnitude-8.8 tremor survived the shaking, only to be caught in killer waves in a disaster that destroyed 220,000 homes and washed away large parts of many coastal communities.
"The country has done a good job of confronting the emergency. I call on everyone to stay calm and follow the authorities' instructions," Bachelet tweeted after Tuesday night's temblor.
She put her interior minister in direct charge of coordinating the emergency response, and announced that schools would be suspended in evacuated areas while authorities assessed the damage.