More than 100,000 people fled to the hills surrounding the Chilean coastal city of Valparaiso on Thursday, in an evacuation drill meant as practice for a tsunami, the country's emergency authorities said, according to dpa. The disaster simulation envisioned a magnitude-8 earthquake setting off tsunamis on Chile's Pacific coast and across the ocean in Japan, which also took part in the drill. The exercise brought the world's "two most seismically active countries" together to practise surviving a disaster, ahead of World Tsunami Awareness Day on November 5, Ricardo Toro, director of the national emergency authority ONEMI said. Chile and Japan lie on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a series of faults marked by 450 active volcanoes over 40,000 kilometres. An 8.4-magnitude earthquake struck along Chile's coast last year, killing 13 and setting off fears of a tsunami that led to the evacuation of nearly a million coastal residents. On February 27, 2010 an 8.8-magnitude quake in Chile and the tsunami that followed it killed more than 500 people. Thursday's drill went off with just a few hitches, according to news reports - sirens that went off late. "That's the point of the exercise," Toro said, "to find the weak spots to improve them in the future."
