Clinton flies to Chile to prepare more US quake relief

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travels Tuesday to quake-stricken Chile to assess what the United States can contribute to the rapidly-growing international relief effort.

The chief US diplomat is due to fly from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires to the Chilean capital Santiago with some 20 satellite telephones to help the Chilean authorities probe the needs of cut-off areas.

"One of their biggest problems has been communications," Clinton told reporters on the plane from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, the first two stops on a six-country Latin American tour.

"They can't communicate into Concepcion and some of the surrounding areas. They've been blocked getting into some remote areas," she said.

Clinton said US search and rescue teams were on standby.

Clinton is due to meet with President Michelle Bachelet and President-elect Sebastian Pinera at Santiago airport, but her aides did not rule out her being escorted to quake-ravaged sites by the Chilean leadership.

The State Department said Washington was ramping up its assistance.

"Chile has requested our help in terms of providing a field hospital, communications support, and water purification systems. And so we are mobilizing those capabilities as we speak and will be moving those down to Chile as quickly as possible," spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters in Washington.

Crowley said an estimated 18,000 Americans were in Chile at the time of the disaster, but that he had not heard of any US fatalities.

Aid pledges poured into Chile from around the world Monday after the government made its first requests for help as the rising death toll from the devastating earthquake reached 723.

Bachelet specifically requested mobile bridges, field hospitals, satellite phones, electrical generators, disaster assessment and coordination teams, water purification systems, field kitchens and restaurants, UN officials said.

Some two million Chileans, or one eighth of the entire population, are estimated to have been affected by Saturday's massive temblor, which along with an Ecuador quake in 1906 is the seventh most powerful on record.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva became the first foreign leader to visit quake-hit Chile on Monday, after learning the damage was far worse than feared.

Australia, which along with most of the Pacific was placed on tsunami alert after the huge quake, pledged 4.5 million US dollars in emergency and reconstruction aid.

The European Commission has already approved three million euros (four million dollars) in emergency aid for Chile, while Japan pledged three million dollars and China one million.

Chile's neighbor Argentina said it would dispatch 54 health personnel, four water treatment systems and electrical systems.

The quake comes six weeks after a massive temblor flattened the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and forced Clinton to call off an Asian tour when she was in Hawaii.

BUENOS AIRES, AFP