Hungry Chileans ransack stores

Police fired tear gas to try to disperse an angry crowd that set fire to the Bigger supermarket after they were prevented from entering.

CONCEPCION, March 2, 2010 (AFP) - Looters pillaged shops, homes and even attacked a fire station in the burning Chilean city of Concepcion, as rescuers try to find quake survivors.

Police fired tear gas to try to disperse an angry crowd that set fire to the Bigger supermarket after they were prevented from entering.

Black smoke billowed out over the ruins of Concepcion, one of the cities worst hit by Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake, which has killed more than 720 people.

"It's full, they have water, food, diapers, but the police won't let us go inside," complained one man standing next to the supermarket after a curfew was extended Monday in a bid to stop theft and violence.

"It would be fine if they distributed things, or at least sold them to us," grumbled Carmen Norin, 42.

The building's roof collapsed in the fire, injuring a volunteer firefighter in the city of about 600,000, some 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Santiago. One person who emerged screaming, covered in flames, was rescued by the firefighters.

Another store was also set ablaze while other groups climbed atop buses or looted abandoned houses.

"Here, people are even looting fire stations," sighed Conception fire department chief Jaime Jara.

"We understand that people need to eat, but looting hospitals and clinics... How can we serve our people?" he said.

One person was shot and killed and at least 160 were arrested for violating the first curfew imposed in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990.

Hundreds of troops were deployed to Concepcion alongside police as part of President Michelle Bachelet's deployment of 7,000 soldiers to the quake zone.

People raked through the ruins of supermarkets, taking everything they could find.

"If they have basic foods, milk, flour, water, diapers for babies, the order is to not arrest them," said Carlos Huerino, a police inspector. "But if they have a television, they'll arrest them."

Bachelet declared a state of emergency Sunday and Concepcion was placed under a curfew that was extended from 8:00 pm Monday until noon Tuesday in a bid to restore order.

"Where they looted yesterday, there is nothing left. They took everything in the supermarkets and the pharmacies," said a 55-year-old cashier who declined to give her name.

At a dairy market, a man threw containers of milk from a balcony to people below while others made off with sacks of flour.

But the crowd scattered as a truck mounted with a water cannon pulled up along with an armored car and two buses carrying some 30 police in riot gear and brandishing truncheons.

The first troops to arrive were generally welcomed by residents desperate for a return to normalcy.

Amid the looting, rescue teams Monday night focused on the disaster area around a 14-storey Concepcion apartment building that crumpled to the ground in the quake.

With other residents still trapped, a father emerged alive from the rubble of the building with his wife and two children and told of the "indescribable" feeling of falling six floors and escaping unscathed.

"We just had our children in our arms and we fell. It's indescribable. I said 'God, help us!'" Alex Tapia, an Ecuadoran sailor renting an apartment with his wife Rosa Maria.

After the shaking stopped, the family were buried in the dark. They clawed a tiny hole in a wall and Tapia shepherded his family through the mangled apartment basement to a larger opening and to freedom.