Updated April 3, 2014 1:12 a.m. ET
Hundreds of thousands of people in Chile and Peru were evacuated to higher ground after an earthquake off the coast of Chile spurred a tsunami Tuesday killing at least six people. Photo: Associated Press.
Northern Chile was hit by a powerful, magnitude 7.6 earthquake late Wednesday, prompting a new evacuation of coastal areas almost exactly 24 hours after an even stronger temblor sparked a small tsunami and caused at least six deaths.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet was in the quake-hit northern coastal city of Arica late Wednesday, and was evacuated along with her staff, according to Chilean media reports. Peru's navy issued a tsunami warning for the country's southern coast, which borders Chile, according to spokesman Colvert Ruiz.
The second large earthquake was part of dozens of aftershocks that followed Tuesday's tremor, which prompted nearly a million people to flee low-lying areas. Wednesday's temblor came only 45 minutes after another fairly large magnitude 6.4 aftershock.
"We were all terrified, and started to climb up with the children, my two babies, moving towards the security zone (away from the shore)," said Linda Zuniga in the town of Alto Hospicio, quoted by Chilean news website Emol.
There were no initial reports of fatalities or damage from Wednesday's quake.
Susan Hoover, a geophysicist with the U.S. Survey, said the magnitude 7.6 earthquake was likely an aftershock from Tuesday's stronger tremor. The epicenters of the two quakes are about 120 kilometers apart, she said. "It would be considered an aftershock because it is close in time and space," Ms. Hoover said.
Scientists warned that despite the rare strength of Tuesday's quake, and the large aftershocks, an even bigger one was likely in the future.
Experts said the relatively low death toll from Tuesday's quake was a testament to the preparedness of this narrow but long South American country that runs some 2,485 miles along the Andes mountain range, one of the most active earthquake zones on earth. Memories of a magnitude 8.8 quake and tsunami that struck central Chile in 2010, killing more than 500 people, are still fresh in people's minds.
That quake revealed serious shortcomings in the country's disaster response system, including a late tsunami warning system and poor coordination between the civilian leadership and the military.
An earthquake measured at magnitude 8.2 struck the northern coast of Chile. The WSJ's Robert Kozak tells Deborah Kan just how this affected people living in the area.
On Tuesday night, almost one million people living along Chile's 4,000 mile coastline were quickly evacuated to higher ground—including residents of Easter Island more than 2,000 miles from the coast—shortly after the earthquake late Tuesday night following tsunami warnings.
"The most important thing is that everyone did what they were supposed to do," Ms. Bachelet said at the port city of Iquique, about 60 miles from the quake's epicenter.
The Chilean regions most affected by the quake—Arica, Tarapaca and Antofagasta—are sparsely populated, but home to some of the world's largest copper mines. Earlier quakes in the region, in 2005 and 2007, resulted in fatalities, property damage and mining disruptions.
REUTERS
Chile's state-owned copper miner, Codelco, said there were no reports of injuries or operational damage.
Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday that they now believe a series of earthquakes in recent weeks were foreshocks, however at the time it was impossible to predict that they would lead to a larger quake.
Ben Brooks, a research scientist with the USGS's Earthquake Science Center, said that two prior weeks of smaller shocks in northern Chile were "definitely an indication that something was going on." Tuesday's event happened when the Nazca tectonic plate plunges underneath the South American plate, pushing up the land mass.
Mr. Brooks and USGS geophysicist John Bellini both said that there is potential for an even larger earthquake in the region due to the seismic gap in the border between northern Chile and southern Peru, where the last major earthquakes took place in the 1860s and 1870s.
"This area should have a very large earthquake, which hasn't yet occurred," said Hernando Tavera, the director of the Peruvian Institute of Geophysics. "The earthquake yesterday is small compared to what is expected."
The scientists didn't say when such an event could occur.
Meanwhile, water and electricity services in the regional Chilean capitals of Arica and Antofagasta had been largely restored Wednesday, with the exception of Iquique, where the drinking water system isn't expected to be repaired until later in the day, said Ricardo Toro, director of the National Emergency Office.
Authorities attributed six deaths to the quake, including a Peruvian citizen. Three people died of a heart attack, two people were crushed by falling debris and one person was killed in an accident, Mr. Toro told reporters.
Airports in the three provinces were also operating Wednesday, he added.
People take refuge at a stadium in Iquique following a tsunami alert after a powerful, 8.2 magnitude earthquake hit off Chile's Pacific coast on Tuesday. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Unlike the 2010 disaster, Tuesday's quake wasn't accompanied by outbreaks of looting by desperate residents. Shortly after Tuesday's quake, Ms. Bachelet declared a state of emergency in two regions and placed the military in charge of public order to prevent looting.
The president and a team of ministers then flew to Iquique to take stock of the situation.
Television pictures showed damaged homes and highways blocked by minor landslides. The harbor of Iquique was clogged with wrecked and damaged fishing boats.
In the port city, 293 inmates escaped from a women's prison during the chaos following the earthquake. Special Forces troops were dispatched to round up the inmates, more than a third of whom voluntarily turned themselves in, officials said.
Carlos Silva, the mayor of the town of Huara between Iquique and Arica, interviewed on Chilean television, said people in his area were ready for the earthquake because of the many small earthquakes and shakes in previous weeks.
"It's been a very efficient evacuation," he said. "We were ready for this."
Write to Ryan Dubeat ryan.dube@dowjones.com and Ken Parks at ken.parks@wsj.com.
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