Chile races to find trapped survivors after monster earthquake

Rescue teams in Chile yesterday raced to find survivors in mountains of rubble after one of the biggest earthquakes while the official death toll from the devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami jumped to 708 confirmed fatalities, President Michelle Bachelet told reporters as scores are still trapped in the ruins.

The mayor of the devastated second city of Concepcion pleaded urgently for help as rescuers with thermal detection equipment hunted 100 people believed trapped in a 15-storey apartment block that lay flopped on its side.

Police fired tear-gas and water cannons to try and disperse looters there, some dragging shopping trolleys full of basic provisions, others carrying plasma TVs and electrical appliances.

"We need food for the population. We are without supplies, and if we don't resolve that we are going to have serious security problems during the night," said mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, warning of grave "social tension".

"It's not theft, it's desperation. We no longer have anything to eat or drink," a woman shouted to a Chilean TV reporter as a central supermarket was cleared out.

Aftershocks continued to rattle the shaken city of 500,000, largely cut off from the outside world with no electricity and patchy communications, as buildings and cars lay crushed together in piles of debris.

President 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-hit areas by plane, Ms Bachelet addressed the nation on Saturday and said it was hard to imagine the extent of the disaster, which had sliced highways in two and crumpled buildings and bridges like they were toys.

Offers of aid poured in from US President Barack Obama, the Red Cross, the EU, regional neighbours 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. The historic centre of the town of Curico was said to be about 90 per cent destroyed by the quake.

There was relief around the Pacific meanwhile as more than 50 countries and territories along an arc from New Zealand to Japan cancelled warnings after their biggest alert since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Japan evacuated more than 320,000 people as it prepared for the worst, but fears a massive wave had been generated that could cause death and destruction on the scale of the 2004 Asia tsunami proved unfounded.

Big waves did crash into French Polynesia, roaring across the Pacific at jet speed, but by the time they hit Japan up to 24 hours after the quake they were little more than one metre 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.

Waves of up to three metres also killed at least five people on the Robinson Crusoe islands out in the Pacific, with several others reported missing. Ms Bachelet dispatched two aid ships to the remote archipelago.