Chile Forum

The history channel is brodcasting "3:34 am, el terremoto en tiempo real" this weekend. I have seen the promos, and it looks good. It is just a collection of live videos shot during the earthquake.

As for the reconstruction, yea there is definitely problems with a lot of promises that have not been delivered to a lot of people. There are thousands more people that do have houses, 90% of the bridges have been repaired or replaced, and major cities effected are up and functioning. There are a lot of small towns though it seems, mostly in the 7th and 8th region, that reconstruction has been suprisingly slow in such a way that it is obviously political.

Then you got these articles, interviewing people that seem pretty happy with the way the reconstruction is going:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/ ... 9920110225

Even that one mentions that there is still a lot not done.

Story in the Huffington Post today on the quake.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/2 ... 28256.html

"...
CONSTITUCION, Chile — Hector Osvaldo Gonzalez rescued more than 60 people from last year's devastating tsunami. Three times he crossed the roiling Maule River, hauling out people who had been sleeping in tents on a small island near where the river meets the sea.

He tried a fourth trip but turned back moments before a wall of water roared through, and scrambled ashore just as his boat was smashed to pieces.

His cousin – who shares the nickname "Lalo" – also jumped in a boat to attempt a rescue, but was swept away by the tsunami and drowned.
..."

yea, there was a lot of heros got lost in the shuffle.

Well....I live in dichato, i was here for the earthquake, i witnessed the tsunami and i have a year's worth of stories, both inspiring and discouraging, about the past year. the previous articles are part of the story, but not the whole story.

i bought a house in dichato three months before the earthquake. partly by luck, partly by careful thinking, the house i bought is about 100 meters above sea level. the house was rocked pretty hard by the earthquake and has the cracks to prove it. the epicenter was only about 75 km north of here. the house was unaffected by the tsunami. in fact....i had a very nice view of it once the sun came up.

i lived in california for more than 25 years before moving to chile, so i am somewhat accustomed to earthquakes. but i never experienced anything in CA like the 8.8 monster that woke me up a year ago. it was loud and violent and the only thing i could think of was....get to place where nothing can fall on me. i figured i was close to the epicenter for the earth to move like that, but i didn't have any way of knowing exactly what was going on. it was all about surviving for five minutes until the earth stopped. of course, it didn't really stop. we had aftershocks, strong ones, for months afterwards.

The sirens went off and i heard the carabineros trying to clear the beach and the low-lying part of town. i heard lots of people driving uphill, or running uphill, getting uphill any way they could. we got three distinct waves of water....one after about an hour, one after about 90 minutes, and one after about three hours....each one bigger then the one before. we lost power after the first one. the waves didn't come in fast, or high....they came in as a series of slow moving walls of water, usually about 1-1.5 meters high....but stacked up behind each other. the third wave, the one that crushed dichato, reached a peak of 12-15 meters, and washed large fishing boats hundreds of meters up into the town.

more than the visual, i have audio memories, because of the darkness until dawn. i can still hear the lumber cracking, the metal roofs twisting apart, the boats banging against each other like big drums, all the frightened voices in the darkness. in the days that followed, i talked to carabineros who were siphoning gas out of upside-down cars because they had no gas for their rescue work, homeowners who found houses on top of their houses, people who returned home to find fish flopping around in their bathtubs, people who were so scared they left the country. i have at least 300 photos of what this town was like the first 72 hours after the tsunami.

my understanding of the scale of the event was delayed because i had no communication with the outside world except for a couple of text messages with my girlfriend, who was in santiago, also very scared. i knew the town of dichato had been damaged, but i didn't understand the extent until i went down on sunday morning to buy bread. there was no bread. there was no supermarket. there was no main street. it was all a bunch of branches and broken lumber and mattresses and clothes and dead fish and dazed people.

by tuesday i decided to try to get to santiago. i had heard that the highway was passable and that gas was available. i made it, but it took 20 hours, because gas availability was very limited and the highway was in real bad shape and the traffic was awful.

i got to santiago on wednesday morning, and saw the TV coverage for the first time. charles helped me reach my brother in the US. my girlfriend and my family called off their rescue mission. i stayed in santiago about 10 days, then i went back to dichato.

dichato was an ugly place for a long time. we were under military curfew for about three months. the army scraped all the wreckage in a big pile and burned it. i had no electricity, no water service or TV or internet. my classes were shut down for a month. gradually...bit by bit....life started getting semi-normal....i got power back after about a month, i got TV service back in april, water service in august, and internet in september.

i did what i could to help people here. i gave them tents and mattresses and food. i tried to help organize a grass roots artesan business. i had arguments with people over water. i gave rides to dozens of hitch hikers. i saw sebastian pinera give a speech on the beach. there were more journalists than town folk listening to him.

it's true that the government response was slow, and that many, many people still struggle daily in their post-earthquake life. many of them were struggling before the earthquake. but the loss of their homes and sometimes their businesses or jobs,too, is a very hard blow for anyone in any income bracket. by comparison, i got off pretty easy.

i've been in near death situations before. for me, the effect was further detachment, coupled with deeper appreciation, which sounds contradictory, but in a zen-like way, one learns to appreciate small things, common things, routine things, and also let go of attachments to anything beyond the basics.

today dichato is much cleaner, and parts of the town function pretty well. there were days with a lot of tourists this summer, but nothing like the year before. the aftershocks in early february scared some people from coming. many of the tourists come here just to take pictures of the destruction, which is still very evident. there aren't enough restaurants or cabanas for all the people to stay,even if they wanted to.

from what i hear, the government has a plan for buying up most of the land in the lowest-lying part of dichato and converting it into a park. they are offering 2UF per square meter. for a typical lot of 200 sq. meters, that's 400 UF, or about 8.4 million pesos. truth is, that's probably what a lot of those homes were probably worth on the open market before the tsunami. when i was shopping for my house, i looked at empty lots for 6M, and many of the houses that were washed into the sea on feb 27 were not very good houses, so one could argue that 8.4 M is a fair offer. it's barely enough to buy some land and build a little shack somewhere else.

some people in town are fighting for more money....a lot more money....like 5 UF per square meter. to me, that's way beyond what those properties were worth, and more than necessary to re-start at the same level the homeowners had before.

there are people in dichato who have lived here for 50 years. they want the old dichato back, and it's really hard for them to face the fact that the old dichato is gone and will never come back. some people have done a good job of starting over, or starting new. there is some debate about how to rebuild, and i don't think that the government policy has been laid out real clearly. once we know what kind of re-construction will be allowed, the re-building effort will gain momentum and the town will renew itself fairly quickly....i mean....it's not that big, never was a stoplight here, and the natural beauty is still here, so i think it's a good bet that dichato will come back. the form of the reconstruction isn't clear, but it will happen, although it's gonna take years and some people will never recover their losses.

Well, we are getting together on Sunday for dinner with some of the people that helped us run the earthquake project.

another indicator of the fact that chile is still recovering is the simple observation that the train that used to run from santiago to chillan has not been restored yet. it runs from santiago to talca now, which is an improvement from six months ago, but still not back to pre-earthquake service.

as for the debut of the movie....i have mixed feelings about that. re-living all of that might be really hard for some people. for myself...i don't think i'll make a big effort to see the movie. i have daily reminders of what happened, and it's not exactly a frolic down memory lane. on the other hand, it is an important part of our shared history, and for some people it might help them shift up a gear and move forward.

I read caliChile's account and am strangely experiencing some sort of shock now in re-living it. I am on deadline now and will post later.

p

Just watched the documentary on the history channel.

Really, really good. It includes live video of the wave that destroyed dichato among many others.

It was obvious in the video that much of the terror people felt was because at the height of the shaking the power failed. No one could see anything as they tried to make it outside. In fact most of the videos are just audio of people screaming.

I definitely would caution anyone that might still be suffering from some sort of ptsd from watching it. I still have ptsd from the earthquake (did not realize how much until I watched that) and it was difficult to watch, but I have had ptsd for years from lots of other things too (hazards of being an adventure at a young age I guess). I kind have made piece with my various flavors of ptsd, so I was not bothered to the point I had to turn it off.

on the topic of re-living trauma.....i know myself well enough to know that my habit is firmly in the nordic tradition of "suffer in silence", "big boys don't cry", and "never let them see you sweat". it's functional, to a point, in an emergency but becomes dysfunctional when it is a daily habit and one cannot ever have access to feelings, usually because we have been taught to be afraid of feelings because we can't control them. it's a white thing.

i know i could watch the movie and keep a stiff upper lip, and i would certainly do exactly that in public. were i to watch the movie alone, i might allow some of my repressed fears come to the surface just a little bit and maybe squeeze out a tear or two. all my brothers are the same. i am sure they were scared for me a year ago, but the most they ever said was "you are one lucky SOB". i said, "i know", and then, "cheers to that".

Don't think anyone on the forum can match Don Cali's story.

----RCX

Below is forwarded from a former poster:
_________________________________________________________________________

As I write this around 9:50 am on Friday, the 25th of February, 2011, I hear the repair crew outside the door pounding away so they can put the finish on a recently repaired support column.

Will this edificio survive another large quake in the future?
____________________

That First Hour or So

I remember the early morning rude awakening in complete darkness, the ferocious roar of the earth, the violent shaking that at first I thought would quickly end but didn't, one memorable vertical jolt that lifted me 6 inches off the mattress and the point where the mind races and comes to the recognition: multistory concrete structure + large earthquake that doesn't stop = this may be it!

I remember immediately afterwards groping around for the flashlight and my glasess (I knocked over and broke a 1.5 liter bottle of precious vino tinto that somehow survived the quake on a wheeled portable table), hastily dressing, putting on my work boots and quickly reviewing the departamento to assess its state of safety. I remember the more than 2 inches of broken glass and dishes on the kitchen floor, the rush to fill the tubs and my pots and pans with water before water pressure was lost as my long thought out plan of what I would do first after a large earthquake played out in reality.

During this frantic rush for water stockpiling and digging out my survival supplies, I did not hear the fog horn blasts of cargo ships offshore warning coastal residents of a potential tsunami which we would discover the next day locally took out around two hundred homes with an eventual death count of seven.

After I basically covered my personal ass, I went down to see what else was going on. The residents had gathered around the conserge office at the gate, cars were busily streaming up the hill as that road is an official tsunami evacuation route, outside the gate, a Gendarmería vehicle was parked and the officer was consulting with the conserge inside the office reviewing maybe a map with their flashlights.

I went back inside the departamento and dug out my battery operated radio and returned outside where I became acquainted with one of my neighbors who was from Argentina. We tried to locate a local or somewhere in Chile station. All we could find as the auto search worked its way through the commercial airwave band were distant stations from Argentina - Mendoza, Cordoba, Bariloche. There was a general tsunami warning for the west coast of South America.

As for Chile, in the darkness and the static of the radio, it appeared Chile no longer existed…
____________________

I think all with a genuine emotional composition who directly experienced this event in the rectangular maximum shake zone or lived in or near the tsunami destroyed areas have at least a little PTSD. It all came down to those seconds where one thought this really might be it where all the material possessions or lack of them didn't matter. Then afterwards, the darkness, the not knowing the extent of what happened and the fear that outside help may be long in coming.

Very thankful that my situation was not nearly as bad as it was for others.