CONCEPCION, Chile, (Reuters) – The death toll from a massive earthquake that struck Chile surged above 700 on Sunday as reports emerged of coastal towns devastated by the tremor and tsunamis that followed.
President Michelle Bachelet said that 708 people were confirmed dead and that the total was likely to rise.
A string of strong aftershocks have rocked the country and strong one rattled buildings in the capital, Santiago, early on Sunday. The quake was one of the worldÂ’s most powerful in a century.
The death toll from SaturdayÂ’s 8.8-magnitude quake had stood at 400 earlier on Sunday, before state television quoted emergency officials as saying that 350 people were killed in the coastal town of Constitucion, which was hit by a tsunami.
Television images from the fishing port about 350km southwest of the capital Santiago showed houses destroyed by the offshore quake and a tsunami, which washed large fishing boats onto land and flipped over cars. There were similar scenes of devastation in Pelluhue, another coastal town, where cars were tossed on top of shattered houses.
People desperate for food and water ransacked stores in some quake-stricken areas, raising speculation that the government would use martial law to crack down on looters.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and some highways across central Chile were seriously damaged by the quake, dealing a heavy blow to infrastructure in the worldÂ’s No 1 copper producer and one of Latin AmericaÂ’s most stable economies.
The quake damaged or destroyed 1.5 million homes, buckled roads and toppled bridges, posing a daunting reconstruction challenge for President-elect Sebastian Pinera, who takes office in two weeks.
Crushed cars, fallen power lines and rubble from wrecked buildings littered the streets of Concepcion, which has about 670,000 inhabitants and lies 115km southwest of the quakeÂ’s epicentre.
A lack of water, food and fuel sharpened the hardship for the hundreds of thousands of people left homeless, and widespread disruption to the power supply threatened to hamper Chilean industryÂ’s recovery.
In the hard-hit city of Concepcion, about 500km south of Santiago, about 60 people were feared to have been crushed to death in a collapsed apartment block where rescuers worked through the night to find survivors.
“We spent the whole night working, smashing through walls to find survivors. The biggest problem is fuel, we need fuel for our machinery and water for our people,” Commander Marcelo Plaza said.
Police used teargas and water cannons to disperse a crowd of looters carrying off food and electrical appliances from a supermarket in Concepcion. Television images showed people stuffing groceries and other goods into shopping trolleys.
“People have gone days without eating,” said Orlando Salazar, one of the looters at the supermarket. “The only option is to come here and get stuff for ourselves.”
Concepcion’s mayor, Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, said the situation was getting “out of control” due to shortages of basic supplies and called for the national government to help.
“We need the army. We can’t have people defending their own possession because it will be the law of the strongest,” she said.
Thousands of shell-shocked Chileans awakened Sunday after an anxious night spent sleeping out-of-doors, 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 on Sunday morning, 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 sprung up amid the cityÂ’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.