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Man, daughter fall 13 floors in Chile quake

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AP – People look at a collapsed building in Concepcion, Chile, Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010. A 8.8-magnitude earthquake …

• Slideshow:Massive earthquake strikes Chile

By MICHAEL WARREN, Associated Press Writer – Sun Feb 28, 9:55 pm ET

CONCEPCION, Chile – When their 13th-floor apartment began to shake, Alberto Rozas pulled his 7-year-old daughter into the bathroom doorway and waited for it to stop.

Instead, they fell.

Plummeting as their brand-new apartment building toppled like a felled tree, they hugged each other all the way down.

Rozas had no idea which way was up until he looked through his apartment's shattered window and spotted light — "the light of the full moon."

Rozas and his daughter, Fernanda, clambered up and to safety with nothing more than a few cuts, scrapes and bruises.

"The earthquake and the fall were one single, horrible thing," Rozas told The Associated Press on Sunday. "I held onto her and she never let me go."

Rozas' neighbors who lived on the other side of the hall found themselves trapped beneath the structure, while rescuers painstakingly used electric saws and a generator-powered hammer to cut into the concrete.

"We don't have any listening devices or cameras," said Ian Argo, a firefighter commander.

As of Sunday, 23 people had been pulled alive from the 15-story Rio Alta building and seven bodies had been removed. An estimated 60 people remained trapped inside.

Socovil, the company that opened the concrete-and-glass structure last June, issued a statement saying it had complied with all building codes. But many residents were angry.

"The construction was obviously poor," Rozas said.

Abel Torres, 25, had a view of the Bio Bio River from his sixth-floor apartment. He had just gotten home from his job at a nightclub when the quake hit at 3:34 a.m.

"My TV fell on top of me and suddenly I saw stars shooting across my window," he said.

Torres and his roommate stacked furniture to reach that window — now a skylight — and escaped without clothes, coated in dust.

On the second floor, Maribel Alarcon and her husband Gunther rushed to comfort their 2-year-old son Oliver when he started crying moments before the temblor.

Their concern was their salvation: Oliver's bedroom was the only place spared in their apartment.

"We prayed a lot," Alarcon said. "And if God let us survive, that was because someone was going to rescue us."

Much higher in the building, Rozas was sleeping alongside his daughter when the shaking began.

"There was dust, noise, everything falling," he said. "We went to the bathroom doorway. Then there was the fall. Finally it stopped."

After they climbed out of the wreckage, Rozas took Fernanda to her mother's house, then returned to help firefighters understand the layout of the toppled building.

He retrieved medicine and clothes for Fernanda. And his own guitar.

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Huge quake hits Chile; tsunami threatens Pacific

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Play VideoAP  – Chile rocked by massive earthquake

• Slideshow:Massive earthquake strikes Chile
• Play VideoVideo:American in Chile: The TV went flying AP
• Play VideoEarthquakes Video:Earthquake Rocks Chile FOX News

AP – Vehicles that were driving along a highway that collapsed near Santiago are seen overturned on the asphalt …

By ROBERTO CANDIA and EVA VERGARA, Associated Press Writer – 7 mins ago

TALCA, Chile – A devastating earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, toppling homes, collapsing bridges and plunging trucks into the fractured earth. A tsunami set off by the magnitude-8.8 quake threatened every nation around the Pacific Ocean — roughly a quarter of the globe.

Chileans near the epicenter were tossed about as if shaken by a giant. It was the strongest earthquake to hit Chile in 50 years and one of the strongest ever measured anywhere. President-elect Sebastian Pinerasaid more than 120 people died, but that number was rising quickly.

The quake shook buildings in Argentina's capital of Buenos Aires, and was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil — 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) to the east.

In Talca, just 65 miles (105 kilometers) from the epicenter, furniture toppled as the earth shook for more than a minute in something akin to major airplane turbulence. The historic center of town largely collapsed, but most of the buildings of adobe mud and straw were businesses that were not inhabited during the 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. EST, 0634 GMT) quake.

Neighbors pulled at least five people from the rubble while emergency workers, themselves disoriented, asked for information from reporters.

Collapsed roads and bridges complicated north-south travel in the narrow Andean nation. Electricity, water and phone lines were cut to many areas — meaning there was no word of death or damage from many outlying areas.

In the Chilean capital of Santiago, 200 miles (325 kilometers) northeast of the epicenter, a car dangled from a collapsed overpass, the national Fine Arts Museum was badly damaged and an apartment building's two-story parking lot pancaked, smashing about 50 cars whose alarms rang incessantly.

Experts warned that a tsunami could strike anywhere in the Pacific. Emergency officials set off shrieking alarm sirens across parts ofHawaii, which could face its largest waves since 1964 starting at 11:19 a.m. (4:19 p.m. EST, 2119 GMT), according to Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

Police and troops in Tonga began evacuating people from low-lying coastal areas and experts warned that tsunami waves were likely to hit Asian, Australian and New Zealand shores within 24 hours of the earthquake. The U.S. West Coast and Alaska, too, were threatened.

Waves 6 feet (1.8 meter) above normal hit Talcahuano near Concepcion 23 minutes after the quake, andPresident Michelle Bachelet said a huge wave swept into a populated area in the Robinson Crusoe Islands, 410 miles (660 kilometers) off the Chilean coast. There were no immediate reports of major damage from the waves.

Bachelet said she had no information on the number of people injured in the quake. She declared a "state of catastrophe" in central Chile but said Chile has not asked for assistance from other countries.

"The system is functioning. People should remain calm. We're doing everything we can with all the forces we have," she said.

Powerful aftershocks rattled Chile's coast — 29 of them magnitude 5 or greater and one reaching magnitude 6.9 — the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

In Santiago, modern buildings are built to withstand earthquakes, but many older ones were heavily damaged, including the Nuestra Senora de la Providencia church, whose bell tower collapsed. A bridge just outside the capital also collapsed, and at least one car flipped upside down.

Several hospitals were evacuated due to earthquake damage, Bachelet said.

Santiago's airport will remain closed for at least 24 hours after the passenger terminal suffered major damage, airport director Eduardo del Canto told Chilean television. TV images showed smashed windows, partially collapsed ceilings and pedestrian walkways destroyed.

Santiago's subway was shut as well and hundreds of buses were trapped at a terminal by a damaged bridge, Transportation and Telecommunications Minister said. He urged Chileans to make phone calls or travel only when absolutely necessary.

In Concepcion, Chile's second-largest city and only 70 miles (115 kilometers) from the epicenter, nurses and residents pushed the injured through the streets on stretchers. Others walked around in a daze wrapped in blankets, some carrying infants in their arms. A 15-story building collapsed, leaving only a few floors intact.

"I was on the 8th floor and all of a sudden I was down here," said Fernando Abarzua, marveling that he escaped with no major injuries. He said a relative was still trapped in the rubble six hours after the quake, "but he keeps shouting, saying he's OK."

Marco Vidal, a program director for Grand Circle Travel who was traveling with a group of 34 Americans, was on the 19th floor of the Crown Plaza Santiago hotel when the quake struck.

"All the things start to fall. The lamps, everything, was going on the floor," he said. "I felt terrified."

Cynthia Iocono, from Linwood, Pennsylvania, said she first thought the quake was a train.

"But then I thought, `Oh, there's no train here.' And then the lamps flew off the dresser and my TV flew off onto the floor and crashed."

The quake struck after concert-goers had left South America's leading music festival in the coastal city of Vina del Mar, but it caught partiers leaving a disco.

"It was very bad. People were screaming. Some people were running, others appeared paralyzed. I was one of them," Julio Alvarez told Radio Cooperativa.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center called for "urgent action to protect lives and property" in Hawaii, which is among 53 nations and territories subject to tsunami warnings.

"Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated. It may have been destructive along coasts near theearthquake epicenter and could also be a threat to more distant coasts," the warning center said. It did not expect a tsunami along the west of the U.S. or Canada.

The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile on May 22, 1960. The magnitude-9.5 quake killed 1,655 people and left 2 million homeless. The tsunami that it caused killed people in Hawaii,Japan and the Philippines and caused damage to the west coast of the United States.

Saturday's quake matched a 1906 temblor off the Ecuadorean coast as the seventh-strongest ever recorded in the world.

Snow is everywhere

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CBS 3 Philadelphia  – Kathy's Winter Storm Forecast

• Play VideoVideo:Storm Pressures Budgets, Nerves In N.J. CBS 2 New York
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AP – Tony Cordero of Albany bikes in the snow in Albany, N.Y., on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010. The first in …

By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press Writer – 16 mins ago

PHILADELPHIA – The effects of a winter storm began piling up Thursday in the Northeast even before much snow did, as airlines canceled hundreds of flights, schools closed and officials prepared to shut down major roads if needed.

The storm was expected to dump around a foot of snow and bring high winds over a swath of the Northeast from Philadelphia to New York Cityto Albany, N.Y., canceling flights and creating a danger of toppled power lines.

Winter storm warnings stretched into Ohio and along much of theAppalachian Mountains, with snow and wind expected as far south as the Tennessee-North Carolina line. The National Weather Service saidPennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, about 80 miles north Philadelphia, and northwestern New Jersey could get up to 18 inches.

In Allentown, Pa., in the Lehigh Valley, 52-year-old Jim Yourgal put on knee-high snow boats and trudged three miles to his job as a valet at an orthopedic center. He figured he wouldn't be driving home in a foot of snow. His dedication was no big deal, he said.

"What else am I going to do, read a book at home? I can do that on the weekend," he said.

The latest snow comes just as Philadelphia and New Jersey have finally cleaned up from a pair of blizzards more than two weeks ago that deposited more than 3 feet of snow.

For Albany, the storm comes only a day after one Wednesday left 2 feet of wet, heavy snow that clogged snowblowers and stranded pickup trucks trying to plow it out. About 150,000 customers lost power, hundreds of schools were closed and at least three traffic deaths were blamed on the storm.

By Thursday morning, 60,000 homes and businesses in eastern New York were still without power. The hardest-hit areas were in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. Another 18,000 customers in Vermont still lacked power.

In the snow-weary Philadelphia region, where a seasonal record of more than 70 inches has fallen already since December, most of it in three major storms, there was some denial about the possibility of another whopper.

Scott Bogina of Haddonfield, N.J., was gassing up his car across the Delaware River in Pennsauken, N.J., a little after 5 a.m. and held his hands and watched rain, not snow, land on his gloves.

"I don't see anything yet. I hope it stays like this. I like snow, but it's starting to be a little much," he said.

Not long after that, the precipitation turned to snow.

Philadelphia's public and parochial schools were canceled for the day, as were scores of suburban districts. Some were holding out but anticipating early dismissals as the snow picked up later in the day.

The speed limit on New Jersey's Atlantic City Expressway was reduced to 35 mph and transportation officials in Pennsylvania said they would close interstates in eastern Pennsylvania if conditions got bad enough.

New Jersey Transit began its morning rush hour allowing riders to use bus tickets on its commuter trains.

Forecasts called for Thursday's storm to hit much of the East and into the Midwest. The Cleveland area could get 15 inches of snow — enough to close in on but not break the February record there of 39 inches.

New York City was expected to get a mixture of rain and snow through the day, with it turning to all snow in the evening. Up to 10 inches was expected by Friday morning.

Anthony Thomas, who repairs cables for Verizon, maintained a sunny outlook — and a sense of humor — as he headed to work on Manhattan's west side, where snow was falling by 8 a.m. but not sticking.

"We're not going to have a drought," Thomas said, laughing. "Cold is good for killing the germs."

Airlines were telling passengers to call ahead, as hundreds of flights from airports in the Northeast were scratched with threats that the storm would worsen. Airports in the New York City area and Philadelphiareported cancelations.

Philadelphia airport spokeswoman Victoria Lupica said 15 to 20 percent of flights there were delayed or canceled by 8 a.m. with wind as the big risk, she said, noting that crews weren't worried about clearing the snow.

"We've had good practice," she said.

Vince Mobley, 42, a machinist at the naval shipyard in south Philadelphia, said he wasn't tired of snow falling.

"I'm tired of the cleanup. And I'm tired of the snow days, missing work because of the snow," said Mobley, who lives in north Philadelphia.

"They'll excuse us if it gets really bad," he said, "but that hurts us in the pocket."

It was the opposite for Alan SanFilippo, who lives in the Long Island community of Long Beach and works at the Long Island Rail Road yard in Manhattan. He was expecting overtime to clear snow from the tracks.

"It's easy money," he said.

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