Chile’s Bachelet, despite criticism, gets high praise from disaster experts for quake response

Disaster experts praise Chile quake response

SANTIAGO, Chile — President Michelle Bachelet leaves office Thursday with a chunk of her country in ruins — and her popularity in the clouds.

Despite complaints that aid was slow to reach the hungry and homeless, experts say Chile’s response to one of history’s most powerful earthquakes has been a model for disaster recovery.

At first, the problems were all too obvious: Chile’s navy and emergency preparedness office failed to issue a tsunami warning that might have saved hundreds of lives after the Feb. 27 quake, and Bachelet didn’t order soldiers to impose order in the streets until after looting had spun out of control.

But experts say other smart moves — like insisting that foreign help meet specific needs, quickly patching up roads and having the military handle logistics — made it possible to deliver 12,000 tons of relief in just 10 days.

And despite extensive damage to hospitals, few additional lives have been lost since the tsunami retreated, leaving at least 497 dead and hundreds missing.

Chile’s critical north-south highway was restored the day after the quake, with thick metal plates covering cracks, dump-truck loads of gravel filling collapsed pavement and more than a dozen fallen pedestrian overpasses quickly pushed aside. The patchwork repairs soon enabled an aid convoy of 100 tractor-trailers to make the eight-hour journey south from the capital to the most damaged cities.

“We were where we needed to be immediately,” the socialist president said in a Chilean TV interview ahead of Thursday’s inauguration of conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera.

It was frustrating to have to make decisions based on incomplete information, Bachelet said: Seismographs were knocked offline when the power went out, and the navy gave mixed signals on the tsunami. She said there was no hint looting would soon begin when she toured the disaster area hours after the quake. Chile clearly needs to improve its emergency communications and warning systems, she said.

But veterans of other disasters have been impressed by Chile’s response.

“There is nothing more frustrating than getting aid somewhere and not seeing it delivered to the people who need it. Here, there is no aid that sits anywhere. It hasn’t collected any dust. It’s getting exactly to the people,” said Col. Julio Lopez, who commands the U.S. Air Force’s 35th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, which has been ferrying supplies and people in C-130 cargo planes between Chile’s capital and Concepcion, the closest large city to the epicenter.

Ten days after the quake, more than 90 percent of homes in the disaster area have regular power and water and a half-million survivors are getting water trucked in. Food aid is flowing in huge cargo planes and military helicopters, navy ships and tractor-trailers.

Countless volunteers have turned out to help the 14,000 soldiers who stand guard and help deliver relief, and a national telethon raised $60 million — enough to build small emergency shelters for most of the poorest survivors whose homes were destroyed.

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that struck just off Chile’s coast was more than 500 times more powerful than the 7.0 quake that devastated Haiti. It was so strong that it shifted the Earth’s orbit and moved Concepcion three meters (10 feet) to the west, scientists say.

Yet Chile’s infrastructure and modern buildings designed to withstand a magnitude-9 earthquake emerged largely intact. Chile had only a tiny fraction of Haiti’s estimated 230,000 killed.

“The reality is far better than we originally feared,” said Raul Rivera, chairman of the Innovation Forum, which promotes economic development in Chile.

Pinera has called for unity and solidarity — but has also sharply criticized the government response.

“When there is an earthquake of this magnitude — when one knows that it will interrupt basic services like power and water, and that it will generate fear, and also generate vandalism and looting — public order has to be guaranteed from the first day,” Pinera told Radio ADN this week. “Here we lost a lot of time in establishing the state of catastrophe.”

A poll sponsored by the conservative newspaper El Mercurio said 72 percent believe the government responded late and inefficiently to re-establish order, and 60 percent believe aid delivery has been too slow and inefficient. The survey of 600 adults in Santiago had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

But a larger tracking poll done before and after the Feb. 27 earthquake said Bachelet’s 84 percent approval rating hasn’t been dented.

Most Chileans blame the navy and emergency managers for botching the tsunami warning, and while 59 percent disapprove of how Bachelet handled “delinquency” in the disaster, more than 90 percent still respect her and believe she cares about them, according to the Adimark/GfK survey of 1,100 people nationwide, which had an error margin of 3 percentage points.

The persistence of the criticism led Carmen Fernandez, director of the National Emergency Office, to resign Wednesday. The government previously removed Cmdr. Mariano Rojas as head of the navy’s oceanographic service over its failure to issue a tsunami warning immediately after the quake.

Chileans might feel differently had the government not quickly overcome the kind of coordination problems that vexed responses to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Haiti’s earthquake this year, Lopez said.

During Katrina, it seemed like no one was in charge for the first nine days, creating chaotic situations that endangered lives, he said: “It was a free for all … it was everyone wanting to help and no one directing traffic.”

Chaos also reigned initially in Haiti, where in the absence of a functioning government, hundreds of planes landed in the cramped Port-au-Prince airport with no clear plan for getting aid to survivors. Foreign NGOs competed for priority treatment, and badly needed food, water and medicine got stuck.

Bachelet, in contrast, insisted on a quick analysis of the disaster first. Then, within hours, she was asking other countries for field hospitals, satellite phones, floating bridges and dialysis centers — specialized equipment that complemented Chile’s own rescue and relief effort.

“In this case you did see an effective and well-executed response,” said Mark Ghilarducci, a 25-year disaster veteran who helped run California’s emergency management office during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. “I’ve seen other governments take far longer, with far less coordination and communication.”

“It’s pretty phenomenal to have such a low number of deaths in such a large earthquake that was relatively such a direct hit,” Ghilarducci added. “There was not a lot of waiting; there was a tremendous response immediately, search and rescue and fire outfits right on the spot. That was good.

“Even 36 hours starting to get the military in place, that’s not a lot of time when we’re talking about the magnitude of this particular kind of disaster.”

Associated Press Writer Federico Quilodran in Santiago, Chile, contributed to this report.