Word: tsunamis
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...rescue efforts continued in the devastated area around Chile's second largest city, Concepción, Chile's President said the government would investigate whether a crucial tsunami-warning system failed to alert residents to the fact that they were in the path of an incoming giant wave. In an interview with TIME at Chile's Squadron 10 air force base outside Santiago, where hundreds of troops waited to be shipped to Concepción to combat looting and social unrest, President Michelle Bachelet described how in the hours after the quake, a breakdown in communication in the region...
...been hit by the wave. A warning could have allowed villagers on the coast to flee to higher ground. "The truth, even if it hurts, [is that] a division of the navy made a mistake," Defense Minister Francisco Vidal told reporters. He blamed the navy for not issuing a tsunami warning after the Feb. 27 earthquake rocked the South American country...
Initially, the death toll from the 8.8-magnitude quake was believed to have been caused by falling structures. But Bachelet said that information arriving from the coastal region suggested that the tsunami, which she said arrived 30 to 45 minutes after the quake in most places, was also responsible for the damage. "It was both," she told TIME. "In Juan Fernández, there was no earthquake, just a tsunami. We don't have exact [figures], but we know that people are dead because of the tsunami." (See how Asia recovered from the 2004 tsunami...
Meanwhile, eyewitness accounts emerged suggesting that in some cases, authorities not only failed to warn shoreline residents of a tsunami, but also may have inadvertently put them in harm's way. "After the earthquake, many people wanted to flee, but firefighters and police in many villages and areas told people to stay in their homes," said an army soldier who had recently returned from the Concepción area and who spoke to TIME on condition of anonymity. "Many residents obeyed, and then they were overrun by the tsunami. It was a cruel situation." (See the top 10 deadliest earthquakes...
...coast], they told me that two weeks earlier, the local firefighters ran an earthquake rehearsal," she said. "They taught the population that if they could not stand up while it was trembling, it meant they had to go up into the hills because there was the possibility of a tsunami. So in that town this situation happened and they went up into the hills, and many lives were saved...