It wasn’t even two months since a powerful earthquake shook the daylights out of Haitians that the same thing happened again seven thousand kilometres to the south. This time it’s Chile, an elongated ribbon of land 4600 kilometres long by 150 wide on the remote fringe of South America. Because of its location, crammed in between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, Chile customarily slips beneath the radar of the outside world. But right now, outsiders are taking notice.

People in the central portion of the country were shaken out of their beds last Saturday morning by an earthquake even stronger than the magnitude 7 one that devastated Haiti in January. The Chilean tremor had a magnitude of 8.8 and focused its fury on Concepción, the country’s second-largest city. It flattened houses, brought down multi-storey buildings, crumpled bridges and other public structures and disrupted supplies of power, water and other utilities. For days people stayed in flimsy outside shelter because of continuing after-shocks.

The tsunami generated by the tremblor wreaked havoc in many coastal communities. Buildings close to the shore were obliterated and in some places the wave deposited fishing boats a kilometre inland. Devastation is devastation of course, and it matters little if your dwelling is a humble affair or a grand architect-designed edifice. If it collapses around you, the effect is the same. Yet, the effects of this earthquake are considerably less injurious than the one that hit Haiti.

Why is that? The first factor is that the Haitian earthquake occurred under the land while the one in Chile had its epicentre under the ocean. In Haiti, the place where the two tectonic plates momentarily disengaged was about 13 kilometres below the town of Léogâne on the edge of the teeming capital city, Port-au-Prince.

That rendered perhaps a million people homeless, injured many, many thousands and left anywhere from 100,000 to well over 200,000 dead. We will never know the final toll, since in the days right after the quake dead people were piled on to dump trucks and taken to huge pits to be buried like landfill. There was no system of counting the bodies, let along identifying them.

In the case of Chile, the number of dead so far is under a thousand and is sure to grow as searchers probe more fallen buildings. Hundreds of thousands need shelter. But the authorities were able to quickly mobilise the army to take water, food and other supplies to those who need it as well as to keep order in places where people were looting supermarkets. Revealingly, this has been more of a problem in Chile than it was in Haiti. The president, Michelle Bachelet, did receive some criticism for not reacting quickly and for not warning people about the tsunami. But information the navy initially provided was unclear and not enough for her to work with.

Chile is located along what geologists call the “ring of fire” – an imaginary line that encircles the Pacific Ocean. This line demarcates the junction of tectonic plates – gargantuan blocks of solid rock floating on a giant sea of molten rock that makes up the core of the planet. Those junctions are areas of geologic instability, with molten rock escaping to the surface

through volcanoes, and by seismic activity from the constant grinding of the plates against each other and occasionally slipping rapidly, releasing vast amounts of energy.

As a result of its location, Chile is no stranger to earthquakes, with minor shocks of magnitude 5 or weaker happening all the time. In fact, most people don’t even notice those. One that certainly grabbed their attention happened on May 22, 1960. It was the strongest earthquake ever recorded and caused widespread damage, particularly in the cities of Valdivia and Puerto Montt. There have been stronger earthquakes throughout the Earth’s history, of course, but this was the first one captured, as it were, “on tape”.

The monster quake damaged and destroyed not only man-made structures but also dramatically altered the land itself. It sent enormous quantities of earth, rock and debris down hillsides and mountain slopes and some of them changed the course of rivers or dammed them up and created new lakes. The land along vast stretches of coastline actually subsided, most notably in Puerto Montt, which was inundated by sea water.

The quake was so powerful that it opened a fissure more than five kilometres long in two sparsely populated and isolated valleys in the Andes. They were filled in by lava which flowed for another two months. Huge ocean waves generated by the underwater quake severely battered the coast with walls of water up to 25 metres high. The main tsunami raced across the Pacific Ocean and caused extensive damage in Hilo, Hawaii. Waves exceeding ten metres were recorded 10,000 kilometres from the epicentre and as far away as New Zealand, Australia, Japan and the Philippines.

Chilean authorities formed an emergency committee to deal with the immediate problems. It was never disbanded and was entrenched by law as an independent body known as the National Emergency and Information Office (Chile’s equivalent of ODPEM). The nation’s modern seismic building code was enacted in 1972, the year before President Salvador Allende, a socialist, was overthrown by a military coup. It was built on laws dating back to the 1930s. The junta led by General Augusto Pinochet dismantled many of the measures Allende had put in place, but never touched the seismic code. In fact, the National Emergency and Information Office was set up the year after the coup.

The existence of that code is cited as the main reason why Chile hasn’t sustained more damage than it has. The capital, Santiago, is home to more than six million people, many of whom live in apartment buildings. Most of those edifices withstood the enormous stresses with little or no damage and there were no deaths. One engineer says fewer than one per cent of the capital’s buildings were damaged, and perhaps a quarter of those can be repaired.

In the coastal towns hardest hit, most of the deaths resulted from the tsunami rather than structural damage. The buildings most seriously affected were older ones made of adobe or brick.

President Bachelet was in tears as she surveyed damage in the worst-hit areas, but the quake will cease to be her problem in five days when she hands power over to President-elect Sebastien Piñera, a wealthy businessman who leads a conservative bloc. A couple of days ago he unveiled a plan to rebuild the country. According to some estimates, that effort will cost some US$30 billion, or 15 per cent of Chile’s economy.

Not an auspicious way to begin a new administration. Piñera admits the quake will affect how he goes about it, but he is upbeat: “The future government will not be the government of the earthquake, it will be the government of reconstruction.”

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca