Un Gran Terremoto!

After a few days of kicking back and partying Chilean-style with a group from Santiago, we prepared to leave Viña del Mar/Valparaiso on Friday, February 26. Unfortunately, all tickets to the north were completely booked up until the next day at 2:30 pm. Until this point, we had been able to pretty much get tickets same day, but this time, we were stuck.

Sebastian made a quick phone call and arranged a place to stay for us in Viña del Mar with his friend Ricardo, who we had met a couple of nights before that. We were thankful to not have to pay another night in a hostel, as things in Chile have been seeming increasingly expensive to our modest budget. We took our things up to the apartment (on the 17th floor), and then went out to explore the town of Valparaiso a bit more, finding some good music, a tasty pisco sour, and returning to the place around 2:30.

We were alone, as Ricardo was working the night shift, and sleeping lightly, to await his knock on the door when he was to arrive home. Instead of a knock, we were woken with the shaking of the tiny twin bed we were sharing. It was so intense that we were afraid we were going to fall off. Out of a dream world, it took a few moments to realize why the bed was shaking (terremoto), and then remember that we were on the 17th floor of a building whose infrastracture I didn´t know whether I could trust or not. It seemed to go on forever and I just wanted the swaying and shaking to stop. We began to hear crashing and shattering of who knows what, both inside the apartment and elsewhere.

When it finally ceased, car alarms, emergency vehicle alarms, and ruidos of all sorts began. I've never heard as many sirens at one time as I did in the succeeding hours of the early morning. In the dark of the night (it was about 3:30) the haunting glimmers of flashlights and the red lights of police and fire tricks flitted through the windows, and we confirmed the power was out. What to do? There we were, stranded, alone, in the apartment, not knowing if it would be better to stay or to go. Jameson assessed the damage with a headlamp: the computer desk had fallen over, toppling over the computer and everything associated with it, a few empty bottles had fallen in the kitchen, but other than that, everything seemed intact.

Then the aftershocks began. This is the third large earthquake I have experienced in my life (also San Francisco 1989 and Seattle 2001), but I have never been so close to the epicenter, nor have I known so many replicas (aftershocks). They shook right up all twenty-something stories of that building and right through my bones. At some points they were almost constant tremors, low and rumbling, and occassionally, sharp and threatening to turn into a large quake again.

About an hour later, the phone began to ring. It was loud and jarring. Ricardo still was not home. At first we ignored it, but then we thought it might be him and answered it. A series of close friends and family members were calling to see if he was okay. In Spanish, we explained that he was not home and we were amigos de un amigo sleeping at his house for a night. Makes for a great story, on both our parts. Unfortunately I could not give them any good news about his safety, only that the building was intact and that a few things had fallen.

We tried again to get some rest, through the replicas, the alarms, the eerie flashlights, and knotted feelings in our stomachs. I was most worried that a strong aftershock might damage the already potentially compromised building, and it was hard to sleep. Ricardo came home; he had to climb 17 flights of stairs in the dark, as the emergency lights in the stairwell had expired, and of course the elevators didn't work. He gave us his account of working in his restaurant, with broken plates and glasses and beer bottles, and chaos in the streets. After sharing stories for a while, we slept a few hours.

Upon arising the next morning, we didn't even know if our bus would go out. The power was still out, and now the water, too. We still heard the sounds of sirens in the background. Anyways, we packed up our bags and walked downtown, seeing the evidence of destruction along the ways. In the stairwell, tiles and small pieces of wall littered the floor. There were cracks in some of the walls. We were glad to leave. In other buildings, windows were blown out, pieces of wall were collapsed, roofs and ceilings had fallen in.

Good news: our bus would still leave today. It would likely have been a different story heading south, but since we were heading away from the destruction, we were in luck. We had no food for our 20 hour bus journey. Upon searching for some, we found that all supermarkets and almost all other little markets were closed. The only things that were open were a couple of fruit and vegetable markets, carnicerias (meat vendors), and a pet food store (strange - there was even a line out of this). There were long lines everywhere. Unfortunately meat would do us no good so we filled up on fruit and veggies. There was only one place we found where we could buy water for the trip. Some of the small market stores had their doors open but with a cardboard sign saying Cerrado (closed), and you could see the entire place littered with the contents which once adorned the shelves.

Apon arriving in Antofagasta, we tried as quickly as possible to find a ticket out of here. The first place we checked had not availability until tomorrow, and the second, with a good price, didn't accept credit cards. Here we found out that the Bank of Chile, based in Santiago, was down, and all ATMs no funciona. With sad faces and bad Spanish begging, we convinced the ticket vendor to accept American dollars (we tried Argentine pesos, too, but he wasn't into that) for one of our tickets. And then we sat in the bus terminal for 4 hours, without even enough cash to go to the bathroom, until we convinced a Chilean/Australian couple sitting next to us to change 10 bucks for some Chilean pesos, to get us through the day.

Probably the strangest thing of all is being right in the center of chaos but not really knowing anything about what was happening. It is not until we reached Antofagasta that we were able to see a TV and internet, and learn about where the quake was centered, and that it was of such a strong magnitude. We didn´t see the damage and destruction except for the blown up windows and falling facades in Viña del Mar. It was evident that this was a huge event, but in the center of it we were surrounded with such immediate chaos and curiosity and uncertainty, and with communications cut off there was no way to find out what was really going on. Upon watching a TV in the bus station here, my heart really goes out to the families who are in some of the other coastal towns that are truly devastated. While we are thankful to make it out of here, and thankful for our health and safety, many of these places are going to require months and years to heal the wounds that were inflicted over the past couple of days. Currently in Concepcion and other towns there is looting caused by hunger and lack of access to water and electricity. Just like with Haiti and in New Orleans, the true devastation and lasting impacts are not necessarily what happen in the moment of the catastrophe, but what happens in the days and months ahead, while people work to solve their lasting problems and rebuild their cities and their lives.