People walk near a destroyed building in Concepcion

SANTIAGO: The official death toll for Chile’s devastating 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami jumped on Sunday to 708, President Michelle Bachelet told journalists here.

The toll is expected to rise, she said after a meeting with top emergency officials, as “there are a growing number of missing persons”.

At least 541 of the deaths were in the Maule region some 300km south of capital, the epicentre of the earthquake that struck central Chile early on Saturday, leaving entire towns cut off from rescuers with roads and bridges crumpled.

In the country’s second city of Concepcion, close to the quake epicentre, recovery attempts were being focussed on rescuing survivors trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

The shift in tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor also unleashed tsunami waves on the Chilean coastline, impacting the dozens of beach towns packed with revellers on one of the last weekends of summer.

The mayor of the devastated second city of Concepcion pleaded urgently for help as rescuers with thermal detection equipment hunted 100 people believed trapped in a 15-story apartment block that lay flopped on its side.

Police fired tear-gas and water cannons to try and disperse looters there, some dragging shopping trolleys full of basic provisions, others carrying plasma TVs and electrical appliances.

“We need food for the population. We are without supplies, and if we don’t resolve that we are going to have serious security problems during the night,” said Mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, warning of grave “social tension.” “It’s not theft, it’s desperation. We no longer have anything to eat or drink,” a woman shouted to a Chilean television reporter as a central supermarket was cleared out.

Aftershocks continued to rattle the shaken city of 500,000, largely cut off from the outside world with no electricity and patchy communications, as buildings and cars lay crushed together in piles of debris.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said Saturday’s 8.8-magnitude quake, the seventh largest ever recorded, had affected two million people as the South American nation counted the cost from its worst natural disaster in 50 years.

After touring the worst-hit areas by plane, Bachelet addressed the nation on Saturday and said it was hard to imagine the extent of the disaster, which sliced highways in two and crumpled buildings and bridges like they were toys.

“The power of nature has again struck our country,” she said, declaring six of Chile’s 15 regions “catastrophe zones.” Offers of aid poured in from US President Barack Obama, the Red Cross, the European Union, regional neighbours and the International Monetary Fund, but Chile asked countries to hold off until the emergency needs could be assessed.

Chile does not want “aid from anywhere to be a distraction” from disaster relief, Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez said, adding: “Any aid that arrives without having been determined to be needed really helps very little.” Officials said 1.5 million houses and buildings were destroyed or badly damaged in the quake. The historic centre of the town of Curico was said to be about 90 per cent destroyed by the quake.

There was relief around the Pacific meanwhile as more than 50 countries and territories along an arc from New Zealand to Japan cancelled warnings after their biggest alert since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Japan evacuated more than 320,000 people as it prepared for the worst, but fears a massive wave had been generated that could cause death and destruction on the scale of 2004 Asia tsunami proved unfounded.

Big waves did crash into French Polynesia, roaring across the Pacific at jet-speed, but by the time they hit Japan up to 24 hours after the quake they were little more than one-meter at their highest.

It was central Chile that bore the brunt of the tsunami damage and there were surreal scenes in the port of Talcahuano, near Concepcion, where trawlers carried inland lay marooned next to abandoned cars in the town square.

Waves of up to three meters (10 feet) also killed at least five people on the Robinson Crusoe islands out in the Pacific with several others reported missing. Bachelet dispatched two aid ships to remote archipelago.

In Santiago, some 325 kilometers (200 miles) northwest of the epicentre, shell-shocked Chileans spent an anxious night camping outside, gripped with fear that buildings damaged by a massive earthquake could fall on their heads.

“It would be crazy for us to go back inside. This is going to fall at any moment,” Mary, sleeping a few feet from her home alongside her husband and three sons, told AFP on Sunday morning.

Unlike Haiti, struck by a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake on January 12 which killed over 217,000 people, Chile is one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries and has adapted its defences since a world record quake in 1960.