Aftershocks in the Middle Class

Abstract

According to statistics from the Chilean Internal Revenue Service (SII) published on the infopaís portal, in 2008 there were almost 4 million residential properties in Chile: 900,000 of them located between the Libertador region and the Bío-Bío region—the hardest-hit area—and on the order of 2.3 million in the neighboring regions (Araucanía, Valparaíso, and Metropolitana). Preliminary estimates after the February 27 earthquake pointed to some 450,000 damaged dwellings (11% of the national total), but a recent survey carried out by volunteers and coordinated by FOCUS for the hardest-hit region finds that 10% of dwellings have suffered repairable structural damage and 9% have damage that left them uninhabitable. Continue reading...