Chile quake death toll hits 700

Bachelet told a news conferenceher country faces "a catastrophe of such unthinkable magnitude that it will require a giant effort" for Chile to recover.

She spoke after a six-hour meeting with aides and emergency officials coping with thequake, which struck central Chile at 3:34 a.m. local time on Saturday.

Officials had earlier put the death toll at 300.

News of the higher death toll came as rescue crews continued to search for as many as60 peoplewho are feared trapped in a collapsedapartment building in Concepcion.

Crews spent the night smashing through walls of the 15-storey building to find survivors. Some of the most serious damage is in the city of 670,000about 115 kilometres from the epicentre of Saturday'squake.

Firefighters searching forsurvivorsin the building on Sunday wereforced to temporarily halt their efforts because of tear gas and water cannons fired across the street to stop looters who were wheeling off everything from microwave ovens to canned milk at a damaged supermarket.

Toquelllooters, Bachelet announced that essentials on the shelves of major supermarkets would be given away under the supervision of authorities. Troops and police will also distribute food and water, she said.

The government imposed a night-time curfew in Concepcion and the Maule regionto try to stoplooting and soldiers were sentto the city late Sunday.

Authoritiessay 1.5 million Chileans have been affected by the tremor and 500,000 homes were left severely damaged. The full extent of the damage remained unclear.

Ninety aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater have rattled Chile since the initial quake, prompting thousands of people to sleepoutside their homesin tents. One aftershock was nearly as powerful as Haiti's devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

Around Concepcion, whole villages have been flattened, highways have been sliced in two and bridges have collapsed. The city's university was among the buildings that caught fire.

In the capital, Santiago, several areas remained without power or running water. Many of Santiago's newer buildings escaped serious damage, but television pictures from the south tell a different story.

Eleanor Wachtel, host of CBC Radio's Writers and Company, went toSantiago to interview authors for her show andarrived just before the earthquake struck.

She was on the ninth floor of a hotel when the tremor shook the building for about a minute and a half.The first sign of damage she saw was a large crack in the ceiling of the lobby.

"There was a loss of power, almost immediately," she said. "People were pouring out onto the streets."

Chileans near the epicentre were thrown from their beds by the force of the quake, which was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil 2,900 kilometres to the east.

A tsunami caused by the quake that swept across the Pacific was blamed in the deaths of at least four people on Chile's Juan Fernandez Islands. The rush of water also caused serious damage to the port town of Talcahuano. However,the tsunamicaused little damage in other countries.

Officials were able to accurately predict the timing of when the first waves would arrive and as a precaution advised hundreds of thousands of people to move to higher ground.

The tsunami warning was lifted a day after the earthquake.