The 10,000-Mile Disaster

As Chile cracked and heaved last week under the force of its fifth major earthquake in two days, a six-year-old boy in Puerto Montt snatched up his baby brothers, tucked one under each arm and tried to run. Walls twisted and split above him. The earth beneath rocked so crazily that he could not move his feet. Then an avalanche of crumbled masonry buried him to the neck. When he was dug out, his brothers were dead--and in the shock and fright of his own eyes was the measure of Chile's disaster.

Fragile Crust. Geologically, Chile is in a mountain-building period, thrusting up the Andes Mountains over slow-moving heat currents in the solid layer beneath the earth's crust. When the heat currents flow evenly, the surface holds steady. When the currents vary, they put strains on the crust, which slips ponderously along lines of weakness called fault lines. The magnified result of such slips can be devastating to humans and their buildings on the earth's surface. Transferred to the sea, the giant push creates huge seismic waves.

Measured on the Richter scale, which counts any jolt over 7 as "major,"* the five biggest of Chile's shudders ranged between 7.25 and 8.5, striking along a fault line (see chart) that cuts through Chile's southern wheat-growing breadbasket and close to coal-mining, fishing and light-industrial towns.

At Concepcion, which has been destroyed five times in the past by earthquakes, only the earthquake-proof buildings put up after the city was last shattered in 1939 survived the first shudder. The cold, rain and sleet of subequatorial winter chilled the survivors as they dug through the ruins for bodies, or camped in the open, waiting numbly for the next jolt. Six old volcanoes and three new ones came to angry life as channels cracked open to lava beds. Just north of the town of Rupanco, a flood of boiling lava poured into Lake Ranco and swept over the town. Short moments before, an avalanche had thundered down a nearby mountain, burying 113.

Two small mountains sank out of sight, a 25-mile stretch of high ground dropped 1,000 feet, and new lakes were formed. Volcanic ash rose 23,000 ft. into the sky. Seismic waves washed away 630 of the 800 citizens of the fishing village of Queilen. In the inferno of lava, smoke, fire, water, avalanche and death, the helpless victims first scurried around in panic, then subsided into resigned silence. They worked feverishly to claw the dead and injured from the rubble.

Drowned Coastlines. Then, on seismic waves of deceptively quiet water, Chile's tragedy spread across the Pacific. Traveling as fast as 520 m.p.h. but separated as much as 100 miles from crest to crest, the waves met incoming ships so gently that they merely slowed them down. But when the waves hit land, they caused an unruly violence that varied according to the slope of a shore, the shelter of a peninsula or the degree of warning.

In Alaska, Fiji and Tahiti, the waves became nothing more than wildly fluctuating tides. At Pago Pago they carried three houses into the bay; in New Zealand, sheep dogs chained to kennels were swept out to sea and drowned, while the waves' great ebb eerily exposed the wreck of a British frigate sunk in 1840 off Auckland.

Some 28 hours after it left Chile, one wave formed a giant whirlpool off the Philippine island of Canarimes and swallowed nine fishermen along with their boat. An hour later the long east coast of Japan, 10,000 miles from Chile, went under. Warned by a sudden onrush of the sea, the fishermen of the coastal town of Kiritappu raced for high ground, then turned to watch the waves fling their boats into the streets behind them. The waterfront of Hilo, Hawaii was erased by 35 ft. waves.

Fight for Bread. Across the Pacific, heavy losses piled up: in the Philippines 20 dead and $150,000 damage;*in Hawaii 56 dead, 8 missing, $50 million damage; in Japan 107 dead, 86 missing. $50 million damage. And in Chile, where at week's end the earth still trembled, the death count climbed toward 5,000 and the damage toward $400 million.

Planes and ships from across the world headed for Chile filled with serums, water purifiers, blankets, clothes, food. Fifty-four U.S. Air Force transport planes airlifted two 400-bed Army field hospitals, lugged relief supplies to shattered towns and cities inside the earthquake region. The first shipments of help only scratched the surface of the need. When a trainload of refugees pulled out of half-destroyed Valdivia, those left behind called after it: "We are hungry! Please send us bread and milk!" At week's end, as hunger grew deeper, desperate men fought with knives for chunks of bread, and troops were forced to fire in the air to keep food lines from rioting.

* The force of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was 8.3, and that of the worst quake on record, the one in Assam, India, in 1950, was 8.7. -In the wake of the seismic wave, the Philippines' main island of Luzon was swamped by an 18-hour downpour caused by Tropical Storm Lucille. In the floods that followed, 108 were drowned and 150 were missing.

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