Hungry Chile looters ransack, burn stores

Looters pillaged shops and torched two stores in Chile's second city as quake survivors ramped up a desperate search for food, angered by security forces trying to bar their way.

"It's full, they have water, food, diapers, but the police won't let us go inside," complained one man standing next to a Concepcion supermarket after a curfew was extended yesterday in a bid to stop theft and violence.

Police and troops stood guard trying to hold back the looters, fanning anger among the crowd.

"It would be fine if they distributed things, or at least sold them to us," said Carmen Norin, 42.

Even as rescue teams scrambled nearby to find and pull survivors from the devastation, tensions rose with police firing tear gas to try to disperse an angry crowd that descended on the Bigger supermarket and set fire to the building after they were prevented from entering.

The fire sent a cloud of black smoke billowing out over the ruins of Concepcion, one of the cities worst hit by Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake, which has killed more than 720 people.

The building's roof collapsed in the fire, injuring a volunteer firefighter in the coastal city of about 600,000, some 500 kilometers (311 miles) south of Santiago. One person who emerged screaming, covered in flames, was rescued by the firefighters.

It was the second store to be set ablaze on Monday. Elsewhere, Chileans climbed atop buses to loot abandoned and destroyed houses.

"Here, people are even looting fire stations," sighed Conception fire department chief Jaime Jara.

"We understand that people need to eat, but looting hospitals and clinics... How can we serve our people?" he said.

One person was shot and killed overnight in circumstances that remained unclear and at least 160 were arrested for violating the first curfew imposed in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990.

Hundreds of troops were deployed to Concepcion alongside police as part of President Michelle Bachelet's deployment of 7,000 soldiers to the areas worst hit by the deadly tremor.

Desperate residents, hunger tugging at their stomachs and their throats aching with thirst, raked through the ruins of supermarkets, grabbing everything from food products to televisions.

"If they have basic foods, milk, flour, water, diapers for babies, the order is to not arrest them," said Carlos Huerino, a police inspector. "But if they have a television, they'll arrest them."

Bachelet declared a state of emergency Sunday in Maule and Biobio regions, and Concepcion was placed under a curfew that was extended Monday to between 8:00 pm and noon in order to try to contain looting.

"Where they looted yesterday, there is nothing left. They took everything in the supermarkets and the pharmacies," said a 55-year-old cashier who declined to give her name.

"The mayor has set up a water distribution point and Radio Biobio is giving out medicine and transmitting information, but we need everything -- bread, milk."

At a dairy market, a man threw containers of milk from a balcony to a crowd of people below while others made off with sacks of flour.

But the crowd quickly scattered as a truck mounted with a water cannon pulled up along with an armored car and two buses carrying some 30 policemen dressed in riot gear and brandishing truncheons.

The first troops to arrive were generally welcomed by local residents desperate for a return to normalcy.

"It's good that they've come because there was a lot of disorder," said Norin, adding some inmates had reportedly escaped from the Manzano prison.

Meanwhile amid the looting, rescue teams last night focused on the disaster area around a 14-storey Concepcion apartment building that crumpled to the ground in the quake.

With other residents still trapped inside, a father emerged alive from the rubble of the building with his wife and two children and told of the "indescribable" feeling of falling six floors and escaping unscathed.

"We just had our children in our arms and we fell. It's indescribable. I said 'God, help us!'" Alex Tapia, an Ecuadoran sailor renting an apartment with his wife Rosa Maria, recalled.

After the shaking stopped, the family found themselves buried in the dark, but alive. They began sifting through the rubble and scraped open a tiny hole in a wall, and Tapia shepherded his family through the mangled apartment basement to a larger opening and to freedom.