prayers for the people of Chile...

They just got hit by an 8.8 magnitude quake.

That's monstrous. That's like more than 5 trillion tons of dynamite being set off. (the Haiti quake, by way of comparison, would have been about 32 million tons: information here). (Richter scale is logarithmic, IIRC.)

I don't know what kind of anti-earthquake codes Chile had - I suspect they had SOME in place, and my understanding is that they are more prosperous and stable than Haiti is - but there's still going to be a lot of death (78 was what I heard most recently, and it's early hours yet).

(I do expect that, as usual, people around the world - including Americans - will donate money to the various groups that provide disaster relief. Because that's how people tend to be.)

But still, my heart goes out to them. And to anyone in the Pacific who may be affected by tsunamis resulting from this.