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CONCEPCION, Chile – Rescuers edged their way toward quake victims trapped in a toppled apartment block early Sunday even as looters stole food and robbed banks after one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck Chile.

Authorities put the death toll from Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 quake at about 300, but believed the number would grow. They said 1.5 million Chileans were affected and 500,000 homes severely damaged by the mammoth temblor.

A tsunami caused by the quake that swept across the Pacific killed several people on a Chilean island and devastated over coastal communities near the epicenter, but caused little damage in other countries, after precautionary evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people. The tsunami warning was lifted a day after the earthquake.

President Michelle Bachelet, who leaves office March 11, declared a “state of catastrophe” in central Chile. “It was a catastrophe of devastating consequences,” she said.

Officials said earlier they had counted 214 dead, but more victims were being found. “At the moment there are some 300 fatalities,” Jose Abumohor, a duty chief at the National Emergency Agency, said Sunday.

Police said more than 100 people died in Concepcion, the largest city near the epicenter with more than 200,000 people. The university was among the buildings that caught fire around the city as gas and power lines snapped. Many streets were littered with rubble from edifices and inmates escaped from a nearby prison.

Police used water cannon and tear gas to scatter people who forced open the doors of the Lider supermarket in Concepcion, hauling away everything from diapers to dehydrated milk to a kitchen stove.

Across the Bio Bio River in San Pedro, others cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.

The largest building damaged in Concepcion was a newly opened 15-story apartment that toppled backward, trapping an estimated 60 people inside apartments where the floors suddenly became vertical and the contents of every room slammed down onto rear walls.

“It fell at the moment the earthquake began,” said 4th Lt. Juan Schulmeyer of Concepcion’s 7th Firefighter Company, pointing to where the foundation collapsed. A full 24 hours later, only 16 people had been pulled out alive, and six bodies had been recovered.

Rescuers heard a woman call out at 11 p.m. Saturday from what seemed like the 6th floor, but hours later they were making slow progress in reaching her. Rescuers were working with two power saws and an electric hammer on a generator, but their supply of gas was running out and it was taking them a frustrating hour and a half to cut each hole through the concrete.

“It’s very difficult working in the dark with aftershocks, and inside it’s complicated. The apartments are totally destroyed. You have to work with great caution,” said Paulo Klein, who was leading a group of rescue specialists from Puerto Montt. They flew in on an air force plane with just the equipment they could carry. Heavy equipment was coming later along with 12 other rescuers.

The quake tore apart houses, bridges and highways, and Chileans near the epicenter were thrown from their beds by the force of the mega-quake, which was felt as far away as Sao Paulo in Brazil — 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) to the east.

The full extent of damage remained unclear. Ninety aftershocks of magnitude 5 or greater shuddered across the disaster prone Andean nation within 24 hours of the initial quake. One was nearly as powerful as Haiti’s devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.

In the village of Reumen, a tractor trailer slammed into a dangling pedestrian overpass and 40 tons of concrete and steel crunched the truck, covering Chile’s main highway with smashed grapes, tomatoes and cucumbers — one of several overpasses toppled along the highway.

Truck driver Jaime Musso, 53, thought his truck was being buffeted by strong winds and by the time he saw the overpass hanging down over Highway 5 there was no chance of stopping, so he aimed for the spot where he thought he would cause the least damage and brought down the overpass onto his truck. He said he survived “by millimeters.”

As night fell Saturday, about a dozen men and children sat around a bonfire in the remains of their homes in Curico, a town 122 miles (196 kilometers) south of the capital, Santiago.

“We were sleeping when we felt the quake, very strongly. I got up and went out the door. When I looked back my bed was covered in rubble,” said survivor Claudio Palma.

In the capital Santiago, 200 miles (325 kilometers) to the northeast of the epicenter, the national Fine Arts Museum was badly damaged and an apartment building’s two-story parking lot pancaked, smashing about 50 cars.

Santiago’s airport was closed and its subway shut down. Chile’s main seaport, in Valparaiso, was ordered closed while damage was assessed. Two oil refineries shut down. The state-run Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, halted work at two of its mines, but said it expected them to resume operations quickly.

The jolt set off a tsunami that swamped San Juan Bautista village on Robinson Crusoe Island off Chile, killing at least five people and leaving 11 missing, said Guillermo de la Masa, head of the government emergency bureau for the Valparaiso region.

On the mainland, several huge waves inundated part of the major port city of Talcahuano, near hard-hit Concepcion. A large boat was swept more than a block inland.

State television showed scenes of devastation in coastal towns, where houses were blasted away by water, leaving scraps of wood and metal — and complaints of homeless quake victims that officials had not yet brought water or food.

The surge of water raced across the Pacific, setting off alarm sirens in Hawaii, Polynesia and Tonga, but the tsunami waves proved small and did little damage as they reached as far as Japan.

Robert Williams, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said the Chilean quake was hundreds of times more powerful than Haiti’s magnitude-7 quake, though it was deeper and cost far fewer lives.

The largest earthquake ever recorded struck the same area of Chile on May 22, 1960. The magnitude-9.5 quake killed 1,655 people and made 2 million homeless. Saturday’s quake matched a 1906 temblor off the Ecuadorean coast as the seventh-strongest ever recorded in the world.

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Associated Press writers Roberto Candia in Talca, Chile, Eva Vergara in Curico, Chile, and Eduardo Gallardo in Santiago, Chile, contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS building 15 sted 11 stories.)

TOKYO – The tsunami from Chile’s devastating earthquake hit Japan’s main islands and the shores of Russia on Sunday, but the smaller-than-expected waves prompted the lifting of a Pacific-wide alert. Hawaii and other Pacific islands were also spared.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled shorelines for higher ground after the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii warned 53 nations and territories that a tsunami had been generated by Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 quake earthquake. After the center lifted its warning, some countries kept their own watches in place as a precaution.

In Japan, the biggest wave hit the northern island of Hokkaido. There were no immediate reports of damage from the four-foot (1.2-meter) wave, though some piers were briefly flooded.

As it crossed the Pacific, the tsunami dealt populated areas — including the U.S. state of Hawaii — only a glancing blow.

The tsunami raised fears Pacific nations could suffer from disastrous waves like those that killed 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean in December 2004, which happened with little-to-no warning and much confusion about the impending waves.

Officials said the opposite occurred after the Chile quake: They overstated their predictions of the size of the waves and the threat.

“We expected the waves to be bigger in Hawaii, maybe about 50 percent bigger than they actually were,” said Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist for the warning center. “We’ll be looking at that.”

Japan, fearing the tsunami could gain force as it moved closer, put all of its eastern coastline on tsunami alert and ordered hundreds of thousands of residents in low-lying areas to seek higher ground as waves raced across the Pacific at hundreds of miles (kilometers) per hour.

Japan is particularly sensitive to the tsunami threat.

In July 1993 a tsunami triggered by a major earthquake off Japan’s northern coast killed more than 200 people on the small island of Okushiri. A stronger quake near Chile in 1960 created a tsunami that killed about 140 people in Japan.

Towns along northern coasts issued evacuation orders to 400,000 residents, Japanese public broadcaster NHK said. NHK switched to emergency mode, broadcasting a map with the areas in most danger and repeatedly urging caution.

As the wave crossed the ocean, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said waves of up to 10 feet (three meters) could hit the northern prefectures of Aomori, Iwate and Miyagi, but the first waves were much smaller.

People packed their families into cars, but there were no reports of panic or traffic jams. Fishermen secured their boats, and police patrolled beaches, using sirens and loudspeakers to warn people to leave the area.

In Kesennuma, northern Japan, seawater flooded streets near the coast for about four hours before receding but caused little impact to people.

But the tsunami passed gently by most locations.

By the time the tsunami hit Hawaii — a full 16 hours after the quake — officials had already spent the morning blasting emergency sirens, blaring warnings from airplanes and ordering residents to higher ground. The Navy moved a half dozen vessels out of Pearl Harbor and a cruiser out of Naval Base San Diego to avoid the surge.

Picturesque beaches were desolate, million-dollar homes were evacuated, shops in Waikiki were closed and residents filled supermarkets and gas stations to stock up on supplies. But after the morning scare, the islands were back to paradise by the afternoon.

Waves hit California, but barely registered amid stormy weather. A surfing contest outside San Diego went on as planned.

In Tonga, where up to 50,000 people fled inland hours ahead of the tsunami, the National Disaster Office had reports of a wave up to 6.5 feet (two meters) high hitting a small northern island, deputy director Mali’u Takai said. There were no initial indications of damage.

Nine people died in Tonga last September when the Samoa tsunami slammed the small northern island of Niuatoputapu, wiping out half of the main settlement.

In Samoa, where 183 people died in the tsunami five months ago, thousands remained Sunday morning in the hills above the coasts on the main island of Upolu, but police said there were no reports of waves or sea surges hitting the South Pacific nation.

At least 20,000 people abandoned their homes in southeastern Philippine villages and took shelter in government buildings or fled to nearby mountains overnight. Provincial officials scrambled to alert villagers and prepare contingency plans, according to the National Disaster Coordinating Council.

Philippine navy and coast guard vessels, along with police, were ordered to stand by for possible evacuation but the alert was lifted late Sunday afternoon.

Indonesia, which suffered the brunt of the 2004 disaster, had been included in the tsunami warning Saturday, but the country’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said Sunday there was no tsunami risk for the archipelago as it was too far from the quake’s epicenter.

On New Zealand’s Chatham Islands earlier Sunday, officials reported a wave measured at 6.6 feet (two meters).

Several hundred people in the North Island coastal cities of Gisborne and Napier were evacuated from their homes and from camp grounds, while residents in low-lying areas on South Island’s Banks Peninsula were alerted to be ready to evacuate.

Waters at Tutukaka, a coastal dive spot near the top of the North Island, looked like a pot boiling with the muddy bottom churning up as sea surges built in size through the morning, sucking sea levels below low water marks before surging back.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology canceled its tsunami warning Sunday evening.

“The main tsunami waves have now passed all Australian locations,” the bureau said.

No damage was reported in Australia from small waves that were recorded in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Norfolk Island, about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) northeast of Sydney.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Civil Defense and Emergency Management downgraded its tsunami warning to an advisory status, which it planned to keep in place overnight.

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Associated Press writers Mark Niesse and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Mari Yamaguchi and Malcolm Foster in Tokyo, Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, Debby Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Kristen Gelineau in Sydney contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON – The White House’s top health care official is optimistic that Democrats will have the votes to pass a major health care overhaul.

Presidential adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle says it makes sense to have a “simple up-or-down vote” on legislation, now that Democrats lack the 60 votes necessary to overcome Republican stalling tactics.

The Senate’s Democratic leaders are try to devise a strategy for passing the legislation with a simple 51-vote majority. There are 57 Democrats in the Senate and two Democratic leaning independents.

DeParle notes that the House and Senate already have passed versions of health care overhaul.

She tells NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she believes “we will have the votes to pass this in Congress.”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged her colleagues to back a major overhaul of U.S. health care even if it threatens their political careers, a call to arms that underscores the issue’s massive role in this election year.

Lawmakers sometimes must enact policies that, even if unpopular at the moment, will help the public, Pelosi said in an interview being broadcast Sunday the ABC News program “This Week.”

“We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress,” she said. “We’re here to do the job for the American people.”

It took courage for Congress to pass Social Security and Medicare, which eventually became highly popular, she said, “and many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.”

It’s unclear whether Pelosi’s remarks will embolden or chill dozens of moderate House Democrats who face withering criticisms of the health care proposal in visits with constituents and in national polls. Republican lawmaker unanimously oppose the health care proposals, and many GOP strategists believe voters will turn against Democrats in the November elections.

Pelosi, from San Francisco, is more liberal than scores of her Democratic colleagues. But she generally walks a careful line between urging them to back left-of-center policies and giving them a green light to buck party leaders to improve their re-election hopes.

Her comments to ABC, in the interview released Sunday, seemed to acknowledge the widely held view that Democrats will lose House seats this fall — maybe a lot. They now control the chamber 255 to 178, with two vacancies. Pelosi stopped well short of suggesting Democrats could lose their majority, but she called on members of her party to make a bold move on health care with no prospects of GOP help.

“Time is up,” she said. “We really have to go forth.”

Her comments somewhat echoed those of President Barack Obama, who said at the end of last week’s bipartisan health care summit that Congress should act on the issue and let voters render their verdicts. “That’s what elections are for,” he said.

The White House says Obama, perhaps on Wednesday, will announce a “way forward” on health care. He, Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leaders have left little doubt that they hope to pass a Democratic-crafted bill under “budget reconciliation” rules that would bar Republican filibusters in the Senate. It’s unclear whether Pelosi can muster the needed votes in the House.

White House officials say they will redouble efforts to remind voters that the Senate passed an Obama-backed health care bill in December, with a super majority of 60 votes. The new plan calls for the House to pass that bill and send it to Obama’s desk, and then use Senate budget reconciliation rules to make several changes demanded by House Democrats.

Following a Republican victory in Massachusetts last month, Democrats now control 59 of the Senate’s 100 seats, one vote short of the number needed to block GOP filibusters.

Pelosi told CNN that “in a matter of days” Democrats will have specific legislative language on health care to show to the public and to wavering lawmakers. She predicted voters will warm up to the bill once they understand its details.

“When we have a bill,” she said, “you can bake the pie, you can sell the pie. But you have to have a pie to sell.”

Obama and Democratic lawmakers say they may add several more Republican ideas to their legislative package, even if it’s unlikely to attract a single GOP vote. One idea, by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., would focus on battling waste and fraud in the medical system.

The main elements of the Democratic plan are known, and opposed by Republicans in Congress. It would insure about 30 million more Americans over 10 years with subsidies for the poor and a new requirement for nearly everyone to carry health insurance.

It would also bar some insurance company practices, such as denying coverage to people with medical problems. And it would establish government-run exchanges to help individuals and small businesses obtain insurance policies, although it would exclude the “public option” that many liberals wanted.

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Early last year, a Chinese company placed an order with a Taiwanese agent for 108 nuclear-related pressure gauges. But something happened along the way. Paperwork was backdated. Plans were rerouted, orders reconfigured, shipping redirected.

And the gauges ended up in a very different place: Iran.

The story behind the gauges shows how Iran is finding its way around international sanctions meant to prevent it from getting equipment that can be used to make a nuclear bomb. At least half a dozen times in recent years, the Persian Gulf nation has tried to use third countries as transshipment points for obtaining controlled, nuclear-related equipment.

In the case of the pressure gauges, it succeeded. In the process, the Swiss manufacturer and the Swiss government were duped, a Chinese company went around its own government’s prohibition on moving nuclear-related equipment to Iran, and Taiwanese authorities showed themselves unwilling or unable to get into step with the international community.

The deal was a huge victory for Tehran, which had been seeking the gauges for months, said nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. It also reflected the uneven enforcement of international sanctions against Iran, at a time when the U.S. and other Western countries are pushing hard to expand them.

“The (Iranian) government looked everywhere — Russia, Europe, the U.S., and they were being thwarted by the international community,” Albright said. “It’s really unfortunate they succeeded in using this Taiwan-China connection…This case is a wake up call of the importance of universal and timely application of sanctions on Iran.”

Iran says it wants to enrich uranium to generate nuclear power, but the West fears that it actually seeks weapons capabilities.

It’s impossible to verify how Iran is using the gauges, also known as pressure transducers or capacitance diaphragm gauges, which have numerous commercial applications in machines that employ pneumatic or hydraulic pressure. But experts say the large size of the order suggests very strongly that they are for centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium.

As of last November, Iran had 8,692 centrifuges, of which 3,936 were running, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Each centrifuge normally requires a transducer, though a single gauge can also serve up to 10 linked centrifuges.

“The gauges are extremely useful to them,” said Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a physicist at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at California’s Monterey Institute of International Studies. “It’s a very big deal.”

At first, the transaction seemed above board.

A Jan. 24, 2009, purchase order shows that Roc-Master Manufacture & Supply Company ordered the gauges for delivery to its Shanghai base. The order — in the amount of $112,303.72 — was placed with Heli-Ocean Technology Co. Ltd., the Taiwanese agent for Swiss manufacturer Inficon Holding AG. Inficon, together with MKS of Andover, Mass., produces most of the world’s supply of this type of transducer.

On Feb. 6, Heli-Ocean received an initial payment from Roc-Master and placed an order with Inficon for the transducers, documents show.

Then the situation changed.

Roc-Master issued a revised purchase order, backdated to Jan. 24, instructing Heli-Ocean to ship the transducers not to Shanghai, but to the Tehran airport. The consignee is named as Moshever Sanat Moaser, an Iranian company described on its Web site as a provider of specialty alloys and industrial parts.

The second purchase order also increased the amount to $145,800, almost $33,500 more than the original, without explanation.

Apparently the change in destination and the nature of the shipment alarmed Heli-Ocean, because in a Feb. 18 e-mail seen by the AP, Roc-Master assured the Taiwanese company that the 108 transducers were not for Iran’s nuclear industry. It also said that Chinese law barred the shipment of the transducers from China to Iran.

None of this was revealed to the Swiss manufacturer and authorities.

Inficon CEO Lukas Winkler told the AP that had his company known the end-user was Moshever Sanat Moaser, it would never have sold the transducers to Heli-Ocean. He said the gauges fall within Swiss sanctions on exports to Iran.

“The end-user certificate we got did not say Iran,” he said. “The deal was done via a Chinese company. And we have a certificate with the name of a Chinese end-user on it.”

Winkler said that before the goods were sent, Inficon reported the transaction to Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, because the number of transducers raised its suspicions.

“We always have the goods checked when it is a big order,” he said. “If someone wants one single device it’s not delicate. But if someone wants 100 at once, that’s very unusual for this type of product.”

In a statement, the Swiss secretariat said the transducers did not require an export license, because “the exporter was not aware that those goods were destined for Iran.”

“Otherwise an approval of the Swiss export control authorities would have been necessary,” the statement continued. “Switzerland would not grant any license for the export of such transducers to Iran.”

European governments have been stopping nine out of 10 Iranian attempts to get pressure transducers, according to European intelligence, Albright said. One European country witnessed 40 procurement attempts from Iran for pressure transducers from August 2008 to August 2009.

Taiwan, however, let the shipment go through.

For more than 30 years, the island has been the orphan of the international community, denied membership in organizations like the United Nations because of China’s insistence that it has no sovereign status of its own. The result has been a gaping lack of familiarity with push-button issues for the West — Iran among them — and a strong interest in building up the trade links that define its place in the world.

Taiwan, unlike Switzerland and China, does not belong to the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an alliance of 46 countries that seek to limit the spread of nuclear-related equipment. However, Taiwan says it enforces export control lists based on NSG protocols.

The transducers arrived in Taiwan on March 9, 2009, three days after they were shipped from Switzerland, according to a Taiwanese freight forwarder’s document obtained by the AP. They were reported to Taiwanese Customs on March 10, the document shows.

A Taiwanese official with intimate knowledge of the deal told the AP they were shipped from Taipei airport to Iran sometime in March. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

The official said Heli-Ocean broke no laws. He said the transducers sent to Iran were not sensitive enough to be placed on the island’s control list and, as such, did not need a special customs declaration.

However, three experts who examined the specifications of the transducers for the AP confirmed that they were on the NSG watchlist. Their movement to Iran should have been stopped, said researcher Stephanie Lieggi of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute’s Martin Center.

“Any country adhering to the NSG lists would likely deny this export to Iran,” she said in an e-mail to the AP.

Taiwan may not be so quick to allow such transactions in the future. The Taiwanese official said the government has decided to require Heli-Ocean to declare any further sales to the Iranian company before they are carried out.

“Taiwan had contacts with a foreign intelligence agency after the transaction,” the official said. “The agency provided us with intelligence that it suspected an Iranian entity could be procuring pressure transducers from a company in a third country and using them for nuclear proliferation purposes.”

Taiwanese companies have been caught exporting sensitive items before. In January, a freight forwarder employee was indicted for helping Taipei-based Axiomtek Co. move industrial computers to Iran. In 2008 a court convicted Taipei-based Trans Merits Co. Ltd. of exporting proscribed computing equipment to North Korea.

Albright said Heli-Ocean should never have gone through with the sale to Moshever Sanat Moaser.

“Because of Inficon’s status as a major producer of pressure transducers, an Inficon agent like Heli-Ocean should have known about the problematic nature of their export to Iran,” he said.

Added Dalnoki-Veress: “This deal is definitely a red flag. If (Heli-Ocean) gets an order for 100 units they have to check if it’s legitimate.”

Steve Lin, the Heli-Ocean boss, declined to answer specific questions about the deal but insisted he had done nothing wrong.

“I don’t support terrorists,” he told the AP in January. “I don’t want to hurt people.”

Officials at Moshever Sanat Moaser in Tehran did not respond to several requests for comment.

As for China, the incident will likely fuel suspicions about its commitment to nonproliferation. The oil-hungry nation is heavily invested in Iran’s energy industry and has opposed tougher sanctions on Tehran. A blog on Roc-Master’s Web site highlights its role in supplying equipment for a natural gas project on Iran’s Kharg Island in March 2008.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said he was unaware of the pressure gauge deal.

However, he wrote in a fax: “I would be glad to reaffirm China stands firm and clear on the issue of preventing nuclear arms proliferation. We have already established comprehensive regulations for export control and an effective system to administer them. All illegal exports are forbidden.”

In Shanghai, Roc-Master official Liu Xiaofeng initially said he didn’t recall the transaction. But when pressed, he replied, “It’s our company’s secret information, so I don’t think we need to tell the media anything about it.”

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AP reporters Elaine Kurtenbach in Shanghai, Brian Murphy in Dubai, and Eliane Engeler in Geneva contributed to this story.