Tsunami Sweeps Away Entire Towns in Chile

TALCAHUANO, Chile — When the shaking stopped, Marioli Gatica and her extended family huddled in a circle on the floor of their seaside wooden home in this gritty port town, listening to the radio by a lantern's light.
They heard firefighters urging Talcahuano's citizens to stay calm and stay inside. They heard nothing of a tsunami — until it slammed into their house with an unearthly roar about an hour after Saturday's magnitude 8.8 quake.
Gatica's house exploded with water. She and her family were swept below the surface, swirling amid loose ship containers and other massive debris that smashed buildings into oblivion all around them.
"We were sitting there one moment and the next I looked up into the water and saw cables and furniture floating," Gatica said....

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Picture Left:Looters walk across a field with merchandise they stole from a market in Santiago February 28, 2010.(Reuters)