Letter from Chile

 

Hello everybody - 02nd March 2010

Just to let you all know that we're safe and sound and back in Santiago from the coast, deeply grateful for our good fortune compared with that of millions around us at the moment. It was very bad indeed, as you must have seen. Much of the south is devastated, due to the quake itself and the tidal waves that followed. Whole towns have been erased by these, simply wiped from the map. The same happened at the San Fernández Islands (of Robinson Crusoe fame). The ocean took people in their houses and in vehicles as they tried to escape. Ships were left beached and vessels left stranded hundreds of metres inland. Constitución, Dichato and others have simply gone. This is perhaps the most heart-wrenching of all the misery that is steadily coming to light as such places are reached - especially as some of the deaths were due to confused messages from the Navy about whether tidal waves were coming or not. But in rural towns inland, especially those such as Parral, Curicó and others more remote, things are also very bad.

At least high building standards in the big cities since the 1960 quake have meant that the death toll is much lower than could have been feared. But there are exceptions, old adobe buildings, others such as the Villa Olímpica in Ñuñoa, and cases where recent jerry building has lead to some dramatic cases of collapsed buildings and motorways. Cities such as Concepción and many other smaller towns were left cut off, without electricity, petrol, water or access to food, as lack of proper crisis preparation lead to supermarkets staying closed due to lack of electricity or fears about their safety - hence the looting, which has been quite widespread. Communications were almost impossible as phone networks broke down. This is now beginning to settle down, as relief is organised, troops are used, etc.

We were at the coast, at our place at Cantagua, north of the worst hit area and on higher coastline. The house was thrown about like a cocktail shaker and the main quake was very long, almost three minutes - which, believe me, can be a very long time indeed! But we were totally fortunate and suffered no damage at all, however surreal this seemed after the event itself, during which it was impossible to stand upright. There was no tidal wave where we were.  At home in Santiago damage was also minimal. Roads were cut, and petrol supplies ran out, so we couldn't return to Santiago until today. Apart from a power cut for most of the following day, very little phone contact and no Internet access, we were fine. Olivia, our fox terrier, suffered most: she was terrified, so send the rest of the night in bed with us, and continues to suffer through the aftershocks. Rufus, cool as ever, was completely unfazed and just rolled over for his chest to be scratched; perhaps being deaf, and not hearing the horrible noise that goes with a quake like this, made it seem less dramatic.

We thought about everyone a lot, and imagined your worry about us and other friends at what you were seeing on your TV screens. Some text messages did arrive, but replying and sending messages didn't work (in the end those we sent  arrived more than two days later). We tried phoning, but it was impossible, and email was down. Finally some family members were able to get through by phone.

Aftershocks continue, but are lessening. Some of the first ones were fierce, more so than the recent quake in Haiti that caused so much more suffering, and there have been well over a hundred of them, but they are much weaker now. The seismologists say they have been expecting this quake since 1985, which was the last severe one here. In fact, it was in a sense part of the same quake, releasing the part of the strain between the Nasca and Continental plates which wasn't released them, due to the profile of the interfaces between them.
 
That's about all, I guess.  Many, warmest thanks for all your thoughts and concern.

Love y'all greatly,

 

 

Malcolm Coad, journalist and writer, former southern Latin America correspondent of the Guardian of London, lives in Santiago - Chile since 1984.