TALCAHUANO, Chile — One man swings a thick metal chain. Another grips an ax. An older gentleman favors a wooden pole. And a 20-year-old spoiling for a fight has prepared a garrote — a menacing wire tied between two handles — to confront any intruders.
These and hundreds of other survivors of Chile’s devastating earthquake have organized neighborhood watch groups, arming themselves and barricading streets to protect their damaged homes from looters. The groups have stepped in as police were overwhelmed by looting and soldiers were slow to restore order after an earthquake and tsunami.
“We take care of ourselves here,” said 51-year-old Maria Cortes. She stood watch in Poblacion Libertad — “Freedom Community” — a gritty collection of small duplexes along an industrial road in the port town of Talcahuano. About 2,000 people live here around a common area three football fields long.
Most of Talcahuano was destroyed by Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 quake and tsunami, which ravaged a 435-mile stretch of Chile’s Pacific coast. Downed bridges and damaged or debris-strewn highways made transit difficult if not impossible in many areas. The official death toll reached 799 today.
But Poblacion Libertad largely escaped damage. Here, residents talk about the “human earthquake” — a growing desperation of people without power, water, cooking gas and food. Many of its residents join the looting, taking food, drinks and anything else they can use from ruined stores — but return home fearful that others will do the same to them.
Others say they’re forced by need to leave their damaged homes for food and water, only to find what little they have left has been stolen.
And so they have organized.
The men got planks of wood from a nearby lumber yard and nailed them to block entryways to the clusters of homes. They erected a barrier along an access road. The crime watch runs 24 hours.
“Each one organizes and protects his own entrance,” said Cecilia San Hueza, 28. “We whistle to advise if there is anything suspicious.”
So far, Poblacion Libertad has had only false alarms. Someone blew a whistle in the middle of the night, prompting hundreds of residents to run into the common. Nearby soldiers enforcing a 6 p.m.-to-noon curfew fired shots in the air to make everyone go back inside.
Elizabeth Ocampo, a 21-year-old resident of Poblacion Libertad, said firefighters arrived late this week to fight a blaze in the complex because they were busy combatting looting and arson elsewhere. Five units burned to the ground.
Throughout the quake zone, survivors lived in fear and fed on rumors of roving mobs. Gunfire punctuated the night in Concepcion, Lota and other towns.
The eruption of banditry shocked the nation and put President Michelle Bachelet on the defensive. Chile’s much-praised urban rescue teams were hampered by slow-to-arrive equipment — and the looting of their local base in Concepcion.
Almost everywhere, citizens have banded together to eat, get water and protect damaged or destroyed homes.
Today, Concepcion residents found nearly every block of their city occupied by rifle-toting soldiers. They enforced a curfew that expired at noon, questioned people at checkpoints every few blocks downtown — an area where the citizen crime patrols are prominent — and allowed firefighters to inspect and bar access to damaged buildings. Troops arrested 35 suspected looters overnight.
Military helicopters carrying aid left Concepcion for outlying areas. But most businesses in the city remained closed, power was out almost everywhere, and residents lifted water from a river to flush toilets.
Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Andrades, in charge of the logistical effort, said 100 tractor-trailers arrived overnight from Santiago with food and other supplies. Solders worked through the night packing flour, cooking oil, canned beans, tea and other supplies into plastic shopping bags for distribution. They tossed the bags from dump trucks winding their way through city streets.
In Hualpen, a poor community on the outskirts of Concepcion, Sonia Garrido and her neighbors had felled trees across a street to protect their neighborhood. Volunteer guards sit around bonfires at night. Collectively, neighbors make bread and share it. Some draw brackish, smelly water from a lagoon and grumble about the lack of government aid.
“We’re bad off,” said Garrido, 46. “No water, no electricity. They care nothing about us.”
Garrido’s son armed himself with a garrote and joined a local crime watch whose other members wielded knives and pistols. But it didn’t make Garrido feel much safer. She worries they’ll kill someone.
She also worries that criminals will get in anyway, simply by wearing twisted plastic bags that patrol members use as armbands to identify themselves.
“I’m destroyed,” Garrido said. “Last night I heard gunfire all around me. They’re looting things and walking around with rifles doing anything they want. Nowhere is safe.”
Like her neighbors, she must make the stressful decision each day of briefly abandoning her home so she can fill a wheelbarrow with water from a system that in normal times irrigates a traffic circle.
Under a state of emergency declared by Bachelet on Sunday, about 14,000 troops were sent into the quake zone. They can shoot to kill if necessary. The military says that hasn’t happened.
A homeowner shot and killed a young man entering his house in the town of Chiguayante, El Mercurio newspaper reported.
In Concepcion, an unknown number of looters set fire to the El Polar department store Tuesday and were caught inside by the flames. Their bodies have yet to be recovered.
Meanwhile, the tsunami that hit the coastal city of Talacahuano sent 50-ton fishing boats crashing onto land and demolished its port — wiping out the $40 million in business that courses through the local economy from the annual anchovy and sardine catch.
Less than 100 miles away, Chile’s economy took another beating as the mammoth quake downed bridges and opened up vast crevices on the nation’s only north-south highway, paralyzing the export lifeline for the nation’s renowned farm-raised salmon industry.
And Chile’s telecommunications system was still so badly out of whack today — four days after the quake — that local and foreign investors who own vineyards that carpet the hardest-hit areas couldn’t reach winery employees by phone or Internet to discuss the upcoming harvest.
“You have to get grapes from the vineyards to the winery, and I don’t know the condition of the roads around the winery,” said Mark Osmun, spokesman for California’s Jackson Family Wines, owner of the Vina Calina winery in the devastated Talca region about 65 miles from the quake’s epicenter.
Chile’s horrendously destructive 8.8-magnitude quake doesn’t have a price tag on it yet, though President Bachelet mentioned a $30 billion estimate when she met Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who delivered 25 satellite phones as a down payment on disaster assistance.
But the quake already has forced tens of thousands into unemployment with no end in sight in the nation’s south-southwest area and will almost certainly mean higher salmon prices at U.S. supermarkets. It also translates into higher wine production costs for an industry already hurt by the declining value of the U.S. dollar.
Chile’s copper industry, which supplies a third of the world’s copper, wasn’t badly affected because most operations lie north of Santiago. Mining company Anglo American PLC said today that one of its plants near the epicenter had considerable damage, “preventing the resumption of operations until further notice.”
The large ships that fish Chile’s rich waters far out to sea rode out the tsunami and can deliver their catches to ports unaffected by the earthquake.
But an estimated 1,000 boats that stick closer to shore were destroyed, said Gonzalo Olea, a spokesman for Chile’s National Confederation of Small Fishermen. Some boats ended up miles inland.
The quake hit just as the three- to four-month fishing season was starting for 760 small-scale fishermen in Talacahuano, said Nelson Estrada, president of their union representing fishermen who now wander around with nothing to do, their jeans stained by black mud that the tsunami left behind.
“The season has been killed,” Estrada said from the wrecked port reeking of putrid fish.
The region where they ply the waters nets 4 percent of the world’s annual catch of seafood, some 2 million metric tons, said Hector Bacigalupo, general manager of Chile’s National Fishing Association. At least 90 percent — including hake, mackerel and shellfish — goes to the United States, Australia and Africa.
Many fishermen also lost their homes, an eerie replay of Louisiana’s shrimpers who were devastated by Hurricane Katrina and haven’t fully recovered five years later.
Even Chilean fishermen whose boats survived intact may find it hard to work because it will take months or more to repair unloading piers and replace equipment that looters stole from fish-processing plants.
“Now the boats are paralyzed because there’s no way to unload,” said Carlos Rivas, a boat captain in Hualpen.
Some went out to sea anyway in the quake’s aftermath, buoying their boats in bays after returning and rowing to shore to give their catch free to hungry survivors in a zone that is home to a large proportion of the earthquake’s death toll.
Chile’s salmon industry that raises fish in pens and competes heavily with Norway and Canada was spared from major damage because it lies hundreds of miles south of Talcahuano. But the sector’s transportation chain was thrown into crisis when the tremor hit before dawn Saturday.
On maps, Chile looks like a slender chili pepper with the north-south Pan American Highway sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. Fresh salmon must be driven in refrigerated trucks for 560 miles along the now-damaged road to the airport in Santiago to be loaded onto cargo planes flying to the U.S. and elsewhere.
The airport, meanwhile, hasn’t reopened to commercial flights.
Some Chilean salmon suppliers are trying to set up a trucking route to Buenos Aires, Argentina, said Kimberly Gorton, president of Boston-based seafood distributor Slade Gorton &Company Inc. But that route is twice as long, and trucks would have to navigate high mountain passes.
Still, no one knows how long it will take to repair all the damaged bridges and highway pavement on Chile’s highway.
“Clearly what’s going to happen is a reduction in supply is going to cause an increase in prices,” Gorton said. “It’s sad because Chile is so dependent on its fishing industry for exports.”
Some of Chile’s oldest and most famous wine-growing regions lie in the heart of area slammed by the earthquake.
Concha y Toro, Chile’s biggest winemaker, announced a one-week shutdown of operations in the area to carry out thorough inspections.
Osmun, the Jackson Family Wines spokesman, said the only news he had from the Vina Calina winery came Sunday via text message: All employees and their relatives were OK, 2,000 liters of wine was lost when a barrel or bottles broke, and there was minor damage to the winery itself.
Chilean wine promoters are confident the industry will recover.
“The damage was not enough to ruin the possibilities of making wine,” said Michael Cox, the British director for the Wines of Chile group that promotes 90 Chilean wineries. “If one winery can help another down the road crush grapes, chances are they will pull together.”
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