Massive earthquake off Chile sparks tsunami

A massive magnitude 8.2 earthquake and tsunamis hit the northern coast of Chile, near the port of Iquique, and prompted a warning for the country’s Pacific coast, Chilean officials have said.

Interior Minister Rodrigo Penailillo said five people were confirmed dead and attributed the deaths to heart attacks or being crushed.
The first tsunami waves hit the coast within 45 minutes of the quake, Chilean officials said, adding that the disaster forced evacuations along Chile’s Pacific coast for fear of tsunamis. The waves generated were 2.11 metres tall, US officials said.
Thousands of buildings have lost power, and hundreds of thousands of Chileans are spending the night away from their homes due to the evacuation order, which remains in effect for northern Chile.
Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from the Chilean capital of Santiago, said that authorities were happy with how an evacuation plan was going.
“What we’ve been seeing on national TV is people running from the beach,” Newman said. “They’ve been warned about a tsunami. That’s the biggest concern for now.”
Newman said the area near the coastline was flat and so there was no way of reaching high ground.
“It’s a matter of getting away as far as possible – several kilometres,” she said.
The earthquake hit an area that has been rocked by numerous quakes over the past two weeks.

Cars fleeing, buildings shaking
Live footage from Chilean television showed scores of cars driving away from the coastline at high speed and state television also broadcast viewer footage of the insides of buildings shaking as the earthquake struck.
The US Geological Survey said the quake was very shallow, only 10km below the seabed. It was centred 86km northwest of Iquique, Chile’s main mining export port, Reuters news agency reported.
Rafeal Abreu, a geophysicist from the US Geological Survey, told Al Jazeera that shallow earthquakes are more likely to cause tsunamis and to generate significant ground shaking.
“This is an area that had been experiencing increased seismic activity,” Abreu said. “They had been paying attention to it … Beyond that, we don’t have any information on what measures have been taken.”  
The warning said that aside from Chile, the coasts of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua were at risk.  
In 2010, an 8.8-magnitude quake triggered a tsunami that caused major damage in several coastal towns in central-south Chile and killed hundreds of people.
The strongest earthquake ever recorded on Earth also happened in Chile – a magnitude-9.5 tremor in 1960 that killed more than 5,000 people.

Source: Al Jazeera