Valdivia[edit]
It has been estimated that about 40% of the houses in Valdivia were destroyed, leaving 20,000 people homeless.[22] The most affected structures were those built of concrete, which in some cases collapsed completely due to lack of earthquake engineering. Traditional wooden houses fared better; although many were uninhabitable, they did not collapse. Houses built upon tectonically elevated areas suffered considerably less damage compared to those on the lowlands, which absorbed great amounts of energy. Many city blocks with destroyed buildings in the city center remained empty until the 1990s and 2000s, with some of them still used as parking lots. Before the earthquake, some of these blocks had modern concrete buildings built after the Great Valdivia fire of 1909.[23]
In terms of urban development, Valdivia suffered the loss of the minor but significant Cau-Cau bridge, a bridge that has not been rebuilt. The other bridges suffered only minor damage. Land subsidence in Corral Bay improved navigability as shoal banks, produced earlier by sediments from Madre de Dios and other nearby gold mines, sank and were compacted.[8] As the earthquake destroyed Valdivia's flood barriers, general land subsidence exposed new areas to flooding.[24]
The United States quickly set up a field hospital following the earthquake.[25] Aided by the United States, a geological survey of Valdivia was done following the earthquake and resulted in the city's first geological map. Mexico built and donated the public school Escuela México after the earthquake.[25]
The earthquakes damaged an area that had suffered a long period of economic decline, which began with shifts in trade routes, due to the expansion of railroads in southern Chile and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.[23]