CONCEPCION: Chilean rescue teams raced Sunday to find survivors in mountains of rubble after one of the biggest earthquakes on record killed more than 300 people and left scores trapped in ruined buildings.
With aftershocks still rattling the shaken country – around 115 since the quake -operations centered on the badly hit second city of Concepcion, where the mayor pleaded with national authorities to send urgent help.
There was relief around the Pacific as more than 50 countries and territories along an arc from New Zealand to Japan canceled warnings after their biggest alert since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
But Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said Saturday s 8.8-magnitude quake, the seventh largest ever recorded, had affected two million people as the South American nation counted the cost from its worst natural disaster in 50 years.
After touring the worst affected areas by plane, Bachelet addressed the nation and said it was hard to imagine the extent of the disaster, which sliced highways in two and crumpled buildings and bridges like they were toys.
The power of nature has again struck our country, she said, declaring six of Chile s 15 regions catastrophe zones.
After Bachelet s call for calm, firefighters with thermal detectors could be seen on Sunday searching for signs of life amid reports of more than 100 survivors trapped in the rubble of one 15-floor apartment block in Concepcion.
Time is of the essence to save the people inside this building, mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe told national television. It s a shame that rescue teams could not come to Concepcion yesterday.
Offers of aid poured in from US President Barack Obama, the Red Cross, the European Union, regional neighbors and the International Monetary Fund, but Chile asked countries to hold off until the emergency needs could be assessed.
Chile does not want aid from anywhere to be a distraction from disaster relief, Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez said, adding: Any aid that arrives without having been determined to be needed really helps very little.
Officials said 1.5 million houses and buildings were destroyed or badly damaged in the quake. Roads in Concepcion, home to around half a million people, were littered with overturned cars and piles of debris.
Tsunami waves of up to three meters crashed into the Chilean coast on Saturday and killed at least five people on the remote Robinson Crusoe islands out in the Pacific.
Fears a massive wave had been generated that could cause death and destruction on the scale of 2004 Asia tsunami proved unfounded, but Japan evacuated more than 320,000 people as it prepared for the worst.
Big waves did crash into French Polynesia, roaring across the Pacific at jetspeed, but by the time they hit Japan up to 24 hours after the quake they were little more than one-meter at their highest.
It was central Chile that bore the brunt of the tsunami damage and there were surreal scenes in the port of Talcahuano, near Concepcion, where trawlers carried inland lay marooned next to abandoned cars in the town square.
Further north in Curico, the quake destroyed about 90 percent of the town s historic center.
In Santiago, some 325 kilometers northwest of the epicenter, some people were still in the nightclubs and bars celebrating the start of the weekend when the quake struck just after 3 am.
The capital was plunged into near darkness as power and communications lines were snapped and roofs came down. Santiago airport was closed.
It was the worst experience of my life, said 22-year-old Sebastian, standing outside his house in eastern Santiago.
Friends who were at clubs said it was pandemonium, said Santiago resident Maren Andrea Jimenez, an American expert working for the United Nations. It was scary! Plaster began falling from the ceiling.
Pope Benedict XVI said in a Sunday message to pilgrims at the Vatican that he was praying for the people of Chile and other populations in the Pacific tested by such a serious calamity .
Unlike Haiti, struck by a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12 which killed 217,000 people, Chile is one of Latin America s wealthiest countries and has adapted its defenses since a world record quake in 1960.
But the total value of economic damage is still likely to range between $15 billion and $30 billion, or 10-15 percent of Chile s real gross domestic product, the US risk modeling firm EQECAT predicted.
The epicenter of Saturday s quake was a few hundred miles north of the biggest earthquake on record, a 9.5-magnitude monster in May 1960 that killed between 2,200 and 5,700 people.
