[KacypeJeope]

The scale of the devastation was still being uncovered, especially in the seaside towns and villages engulfed by massive waves minutes after the gigantic quake struck at 3:34 am (0634 GMT).

Chile quake far bigger but less deadly than Haiti yeah, one of the aftershocks was bigger than the quake in haiti. the waves look to have been very damaging. the quake in santiago was ~7.0 so it would seem engineeringly only goes so far (~7.0) supposedly the damage in santiago is mainly transportation related but in the south it's much wore. I'd imagine it will take years to rebuild, if ever (who knows how many people will move north, wasn't there an even bigger quake in this area before?)

edited to add:
Earthquake experts said the death toll so far appears low considering to the enormous power of the magnitude-8.8 quake, in part because many buildings were engineered to withstand such an event. The northern capital of Santiago was slowly returning to business as usual Monday. Subway lines were running again and many shops and offices were open for business, though residents were rattled by aftershocks and scattered cases of gangs attempting to rob markets that been damaged in the quakelooting by gangs.

The worst devastation may by in Chile's small coastal towns, which received a double blow from the earthquake and the tsunami waves that followed it....Mr. Holzmann said that even though Ms. Bachelet visited the affected areas in a helicopter hours after the quake, she didn't appear to get good information about the devastation, exposing deficiencies in Chile's civil defense services..."I think the government is actually doing good job of coordinating all the offers of international assistance and mobilizing their resources," said Tracy Reines, who directs international emergency response for the American Red Cross. "I don't think anyone is underestimating anything." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...014328896.html
SANTIAGO, Chile—Chile's stringent, well-enforced building codes saved most modern buildings and countless lives. Still, extensive use of adobe in older structures meant that many of those buildings fell in the hardest-hit regions of the country.
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More than 720 people were killed in Saturday's earthquake, an 8.8 magnitude temblor that ranks as the world's fifth-largest on record. Chile has endured many earthquakes—including the most powerful ever recorded, a 9.5 behemoth that hit the country in 1960—and Saturday's was the worst in 50 years. Chileans have applied the hard lessons learned from those earthquakes in adopting building codes for new structures.

A major reason the Jan. 12 Haiti quake claimed more than 220,000 victims is because buildings in the Caribbean country weren't built with the sturdy practices Chile requires.

In the country's capital, the oldest districts that suffered the greatest damage, because many houses are constructed of adobe, a mixture of mud and straw that can support large amounts of weight, but can't withstand the violent undulations caused by earthquakes.

By contrast, the country's modern high-rises withstood the tremendous shaking because of standards adopted in 1996, said Christian Seal, professor of civil engineering at the University of Santiago de Chile. New buildings in Chile must be inspected by third parties for design and construction. They must also be approved by local authorities.

"The buildings that fell down were old adobe buildings," said Seal. "Only in exceptional cases did new buildings collapse."

Chile's building code is similar to that used in the U.S., said Bill Holmes, a member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, based in Oakland, Calif. Standards for concrete, he said, are almost identical. Many of the skyscrapers that pierce Santiago's skyline are built around frame-construction designs that use reinforced concrete—concrete with iron or steel mesh embedded in it.

As scientists have learned more about earthquakes, they have developed new ways to keep buildings from falling down. So-called moment-resisting frames join columns and beams in a way that absorbs the energy of a temblor, whereas steel-frame bracing, such as the X-shaped grid on the exterior of Chicago's John Hancock building, also absorb lateral forces. One of the newest techniques, base isolation, places bearings between a building and its foundation. That way, the foundation—not the rest of the building—absorbs most of the shaking, said Bill Baker, a partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, an engineering firm based in Chicago. Base isolation was used in the international terminal at San Francisco International Airport, which opened in 2000.

Chile has historically relied on an older—but tried and true—technology: reinforced concrete shear walls. Those walls, which are typically anchored to the foundation and designed to withstand lateral forces, "put more earthquake resistance into the system," said Daniel Abrams, Willet Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Chilean construction practices have had more of that than other countries," he said. A 1987 report to the National Science Foundation reported that wall density—the ratio of wall area to floor area—is "typically much higher in Chilean construction than in construction in seismic zones in the United States."
... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...rld_MIDDLENews

UPDATE 2: CONCEPCION, Chile — Frightened residents of Chile’s second-largest city, hit hard by Saturday’s huge earthquake, banded together Monday to protect what’s left of their shattered neighborhoods, trying to ward off roving packs of looters.

Associated Press
People wait to catch goods thrown from a supermarket window during sporadic looting in Concepcion.

Men, women, teenagers — even the elderly — joined in an effort to stop gangs from invading their neighborhoods. They wore armbands to identify themselves as watch groups, and were armed with axes, sticks, stones, wooden bedposts – and sometimes guns.

Andres Coronado joined with his neighbors in the Pedro de Valdivia Bajo neighborhood of Concepcion after they saw the situation spiraling out of control. They milled around a street covered in bricks and stone–the debris of somebody’s home—and made use of a small fire to keep warm

“There aren’t enough of them,” Coronado said of the police and soldiers in Concepcion. “The situation is out of their hands right now, so we organized at midday.” good to own a gun