Shell-shocked Chileans rather sleeping on the street

SANTIAGO, Chile (AFP) —Thousands of shell-shocked Chileans awakened last night after an anxious night spent sleeping outdoors, gripped with fear that buildings damaged by a massive earthquake could fall on their heads.

"It would be crazy for us to go back inside. This is going to fall at any moment," Santiago resident Mary, sleeping a few feet from her home alongside her husband and three sons, told AFP yesterday morning.

"We would rather be on the street, for the safety of our children," she said, admitting she slept for only a few hours because of the more than 100 aftershocks rattling the region since the historic quake struck early Saturday.

Makeshift camps sprang up amid the city's rubble-strewn streets, while with the returning electricity residents gathered around televisions propped up on outdoor patios to hear the latest news reports on the tremor, the seventh largest ever recorded.

The Chilean government warned people to stay away from damaged buildings because of the imminent danger of collapse, especially with powerful aftershocks continuing for a second day. The 8.8-magnitude tremor killed at least 300 people, according to the last official figures.

In the Maipu neighbourhood in eastern Santiago, indignant Chileans angrily gestured towards their modern, five-year apartment block that was severely damaged by the quake.

After sleeping rough on the street outside their building, weary residents demanded the heads of companies that built the five-story structure, which will almost certainly need to be demolished.

It was a "night of much pain, uncertainty, despair... it was like waking to a nightmare. We don't even dare to enter the apartments to remove our belongings," a resident told AFP outside the Don Tristan condo building, which appeared on the brink of collapse.

Santiago, a city of six million people, is accustomed to strong earthquakes, and buildings have high standard construction codes to ensure buildings sustain such tremors.

The strength of the quake, however, left many both modern and historic structures in ruins. Modern urban highways that crisscross the capital were severely damaged, and hundreds of older buildings collapsed completely.

Paul Terpstra, a Dutch tourist desperate to get home and waiting for Santiago's damaged airport to reopen, recounted how he fled his downtown hotel in the middle of the night when the earthquake struck.

"I was scared that the building would collapse. I didn't even have time to get my clothes so I ran outside naked," he said.

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