Earthquake

At 3:43 am on the morning of Saturday, February 27th an 8.8 earthquake hit Chile, about 100 kilometers from the city of Concepcion, in the eighth region (Region Bio Bio).

As it was almost four in the morning, so we were all asleep; the earthquake woke us up. I was in Lago Ranco, in the tenth region (Region de los Lagos), at the summer home of my parent’s friends, Mary Anne and Diego. The house we were in was made of wood, one of the safest building materials for earthquake zones. I was sleeping in the top bunk of a bunk bed and awoke to the violent shaking. My first thought was that whatever it was couldn’t last long, so I waited. My second thought was that the house was sliding off of its foundation and down the hill toward the lake. My third thought was to try to get out.

I tried to get up, but was almost thrown from the bed, so I pressed my body down against the mattress and gripped the sides of the bed. The quake seemed to last forever; in reality it was three and a half minutes, an eternity for an earthquake.

I remember hearing the doors creek back and forth and slam over and over again. When it finally stopped, I made sure that everyone else in the room was fine and went back to bed.

We had been planning on leaving early the next morning, but when I got up, my dad said that we were going to wait and make sure the road was clear before we tried to go back to Santiago. There was remarkably little damage in the house. No dishes had broken as they had all been in the dishwasher. A few cracks in the wood had appeared, but there was no structural damage to the house. Next door, all of the dishes had shattered.

We spent the day trying to get an email out and searching for news. Our cell phones didn’t work, but Diego’s iphone worked for a few minutes here and there. Around 2:00 pm I was finally able to get an email out telling my boyfriend that I was fine and asking that he call my grandparents to let them know that we were all ok.

We tried to listen to an old radio that Diego had, but couldn’t get it to work. I guess the news stations were down too. We finally got an old, little TV to show us a news station. The government asked people not to travel, so that the roads could be used by those bringing in emergency services. We decided to wait.

We finally headed back to Santiago on Monday as Diego wanted to get back to Santiago as his winery had suffered a lot of damage. We set out around 9:00 am and headed north. We left before Diego and Mary Anne, but they soon caught up with us as they drive a bit faster. We stopped at a gas station to find a line 20 cars long. We waited and waiting knowing that we would only get 10,000 pesos worth of gas, about $20 worth. After 45 minutes the manager came out and told us that the car in front of us, Diego’s car, would be the last one to get gas as they had to save some for the army. Diego talked to the guys at the pump and they agreed to give us gas as well as we were traveling together. After Diego got his gas, we pulled up, and just then, the manager cut the generator and we didn’t get gas.

We headed on to the next gas station where we were able to get 10,000 pesos worth of gas in the car as well as fill the 10 liter gas tank we had on top of the car, which Kalindi walked in with separate, pretending not to know us. We followed this routine at about 5 gas stations before finding one that would fill the tank.

In addition to the problem finding gas, there were many cracks in the road, sometimes as much as six inches change in the height of the pavement. If it was more than six inches, the section would be marked off or we would be funneled onto a long detour on which the traffic was horrible. At 1:00 am we made it back to the highway after spending over three hours on a single detour, averaging about 2 miles an hour. Because we could no longer see the cracks in the road and had already seen a couple people pulled over after cracks changing tires, we decided to stop for the night. We camped out next to a toll booth, and only later found out that we were only a few miles from a prison from which all the prisoners had escaped because of the earthquake damage and power outages.

We made it home the next night after crossing a number of questionable bridges and seeing a lot of damage. Even Santiago had some damage, though not as much as Los Angeles and Talca. A couple of apartment buildings had collapsed, but all of them had been built by companies with bad reputations.

Though nothing had broken at the house in Lago Ranco, a few glasses had fallen in our apartment in Santiago (our apartment is on the 5th floor) and a few cracks had appeared in the walls and in the tiles around the doorframe. For weeks after the earthquake we experienced aftershocks. Though interesting at first, they got old real fast.

For more about the earthquake and our experiences feel free to check out my mother’s blog at cnaslund.blogspot.com