CRISISBOOM

NEAR EPICENTER Concepción, Chile’s second-largest metropolitan area, was badly damaged in last February’s quake.

When a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Chile last February, geophysicists and seismologists were not surprised. The quake’s epicenter was on a roughly 200-mile stretch of a fault where stresses had been building for nearly two centuries, and experts had expected that one day the strain would be relieved in a cataclysmic event.