El Terremoto: Pt. 2

I had never experienced an earthquake before: I'd slept through a few tremors in North Carolina coming from the mostly inactive fault line in Georgia, but never anything like this, and I was expecting chunks of our house to begin falling off at any second. The power shut off almost as soon as the earthquake started, and with the first tremors, sirens began going off all around the city, adding to the noise of the quake and the rattling of the house and crash of ceramics and a hefty, wooden wall-hanging in my room. But once the earthquake stopped and we all came out of our rooms to make sure everyone was alright and to inspect the damage, I was honestly surprised; the ceramic vase that held our toothbrushes in the bathroom had toppled to the ground and smashed and there were a couple of other small ceramic pieces that had fallen as well, but the most damage was in the living room, where a ceramic candle holder had fallen off a shelf and smashed a glass table in one corner, which we didn't discover until cleaning up in the morning.

The house I'm staying in has three stories that, by American standards, would be cramped, but which have been industriously organized to exactly fit the needs of my host family. The front door opens into the living room, and a short hall leads back into a small kitchen and then a homey dining room, which is the center of the house's activities, with a TV and a computer. My room is on the second floor, between the main bathroom and the bedroom of two of the family's three sons (the third is studying cello in Paris right now); the third floor, which is smaller than the other two, is simply a bedroom, where my host parents sleep.

After calling out each others names, someone found a flashlight and I found my headlamp, and we all met going down the stairs and into the living room, where we started searching the house for cracks, damages - anything that was broken. We cleaned up the largest pieces of the broken ceramics and then opened the front and back doors; the former opens onto a small street and the latter onto the parking lot and the very small plaza made by the three perpendicular blocks of houses. There were people all over the place, some forced out of their houses but most like us, simply curious about how the rest of Santiago had fared. Cars and bicycles flew down the streets, even though it was almost 4 in the morning, but if nothing else, the open doors let in a little light.

We spent about 2 hours awake after the earthquake, most of that simply sitting in the living room as my host family tried to reach relatives or waited for friends and family to call. The phone lines in Santiago and to the north were mostly open, but anything further south was cut off. And even though I've heard that some people were able to use their cell phones immediately after the quake, it must have been a short window, because the cellular network had crashed from too many calls all at once by the time anyone in my family turned on their phones. In those couple of hours, we had visits from neighbors, and we went out into the parking lot where someone had started up his car and had the radio on. That was when we first found out what had actually happened - that the earthquake was rated at 8.3 (that rating was bumped up to 8.8 during the day), and that it was centered about 200 miles from Santiago in the Región Bío Bío. I think the size of the quake took us all by surprise: we knew it was fairly large, but nothing like that. As violent as the quake had been in Santiago, we were lucky we were so far away from the epicenter.

As all of this was going on there were a number of aftershocks, most of which were rated at over 5.0 on the Richter scale, and one over 6.5. In fact, more than 20 hours later, we're still getting some aftershocks, although, with a couple of exceptions, they've been much weaker and less frequent. Eventually, with the power still out and communication almost completely shut down, we all went back to bed.

(Hopefully I'll have the rest tomorrow.)