Humberto Hernández, a boat captain, said that people ran “screaming in all directions” when the earthquake hit, leaving their belongings behind as they rushed for the hills.

Image The sea swallowed houses and boats in Tubul, Chile. Credit... The New York Times

“It was like an apocalypse that night, just like that movie ‘2012,’ ” said Mr. Hernández, 34.

About a half-hour later, the waves roared through the town, smashing fishing boats into homes along the beach. The surge of water picked up one blue house and left it about 500 yards away, where it still rests.

Juan Carlos Sombelo, a fisherman, said he never made it out of his house by the beach and was carried by a wave for about a kilometer, but survived by hanging onto rocks and other debris as the waves receded. “I just told myself, ‘Pull yourself up, pull yourself up,’ ” Mr. Sombelo said, with bruises on his arms and legs and a gash on his right temple. “I was as good as dead, but the water had carried me so far inside that I made it.”

On Tuesday, the streets of Tubul seemed as if a bulldozer had run through them, mangling homes and splitting them into hundreds of pieces. Rubble was stacked more than six feet high. Cats and dogs lay dead alongside roads, flies buzzing over them. People staggered deliriously through the streets, their throats parched from the powerful summer heat and their energy levels at a low ebb.

“This was my house,” said Claudia Álvarez, 42, pointing to twisted rubble that looked more like a junk pile. She roamed the town in a ripped dress, begging for help to get to nearby Arauco, another town ravaged by the quake and ensuing tsunami, so she could search for her husband.

In both coastal towns, there was no electricity, telephone service, working cellphone networks or drinkable water. The towns barely had fuel to operate cars, and the scant food was running out quickly. Still, so many lives had been spared in the violent flood of water that some residents had hope that the sea had not turned against them.