I've been at work all day and did not realize that there'd been an 8.8 earthquake in Chile. One of my uncles, born and raised in Hawaii, sent me video clips of the gas lines there and the tsunami warning signal, which clued me in to it.

Are our Chilean participants okay?

By way of an update, I heard by email from George, who is okay, but who reports the earthquake did impact his wife's family. They all survived the quake, however. George reports he's very busy reporting the situation for Dow Jones news wire.

I still haven't received anything from Oscar, and his email has bounced back.

THe earthquake was not that bad for me, because I live in a new building that only sufered minor damage. However as I live in the 8th floor, it was like being shaken inside a coktail. All my books and furnitue ended up on the floor. The computer I'm writing on was pretty battered and I had to spend the night with my kids in the street because the fire department evacuated my building while they cheked it.

I usually work translating financial news into spanish, but I spend that weekend and last week reporting the earthquake with a company team that came to help us change to a new office. It was a good professional experience to be able to do something important in a time like this.
The earthquake was not to bad in Santiago and Valparaiso but in the mid south it was pretty bad. Specially in Concepción that was isolated and suffered serious looting and arson because the outgoing govberment took too long in calling the armed forces to restablish order and deliver aid.
My wife's town of Pichilemu was also hit by the tsunami that followed the quake, but damage was mostly limited to the seafront (beach, a small Navy instalation, restaurants and such) but the local fishermen lost their boats and their costal infraestructure. One of my brothers in law, who is a lifeguard, actually swam in after the giant wave and rescued a person. The town's problem is that the current govberment has not declared a state of catastrophe in their region.

Next week I'll cover the inauguration of the new president, this time a conservative, and after that the FIDAE airshow that was not cancelled even after the damage suffered at the international airport.

This weekend I just caught up on my lost sleep and got to enjoy the pool with my kids (it's still very hot in Santiago as it's late summer). When I have some more rest I'll post something on what the armed forces are doing: they put an end to looting, are delivering relief supplies and set up field hospitals (along with several foreign field hospitals). The Navy's ASMAR shipyard was hit hard by the tsunami and several vesels in construction were damaged, but the new Scorpene submarines escaped the giant waves in the nick of time.

Thanks for everybody's concern,
George Seal

Today we had the Presidential Inauguration. Of course we had to have a very big aftershock during the ceremony. And after the first one we had another one, and then another one. It's been going on all night.
There was also the tsunami alarm in mid inauguration. And just in time to happen when my father's company was restarting water supply in a costal city were the population was being evacuated to higher ground.
This just keeps going day after day. It just had to be worse today.
At night, when the ground shakes my kids don't even bother to wake up now.

Have there been continual aftershocks the whole time?

Sorry for not having dropped a line earlier. Luckily we’re all right in the family. We were just returning that night from our summer holidays (we’re also down-under here) so the shake caught us together. The quake was 8.8, the fifth in magnitude in world history since earthquakes are measured, (and second in Chile’s history), and having experienced a 7.8 in 1985 is something that I don’t want to enjoy again.

The first in magnitude in world history happened also here, in 1960, a 9.5 Richter scale, at the southern town of Valdivia, geography was changed because of that.

Chileans are used to earthquakes and I personally don’t fear them that much, but it’s different when you have children and this mammoth hits you, but with my wife we didn’t loose temper and the house (that we build on masonry and reinforced concrete), stood up pretty well. Fortunately Chilean construction codes are very stringent, and are well enforced; and that saved many, many lives. Only a tiny percentage of the buildings constructed since 1985 (the last big earthquake) or even 1935 (when the first construction codes were issued - after a horrific earthquake in 1928) collapsed or were seriously damaged, with the sad exception of adobe, that dates from colonial times, and with very few exceptions is no longer used but comprises mostly of the old parts of Central and Southern Chile’s cities.

It’s impossible that the country could remain unscathed after an 8.8, casualties from the earthquake itself are relatively low; what was lethal was the tsunami that hit the coast, with waves ranging from 5 mts to 15 mts and left many people missing that are still unaccounted for. The current death toll is 497 identified victims.

Some cities in the south, constructed mostly in adobe, or on masonry without reinforced concrete, are flat on the ground, and some coastal towns were erased by the tsunami (tragically the sea took the lives of 2 children of a friend, 4 and 2 years old, that were still vacationing) but we Chileans are resilient, tenacious and very, very headstrong, and still cling to this strip of the land that from time to time tries to buck us off from it’s back. We invariably fell, remove the dust, wipe our tears and mount again, we’ve been doing that from the last 450 years (the first recorded earthquake was in 1570, precisely at the same city affected today, Concepcion, a major coastal city – Concepcion’s old quarter downtown looks like a scene of “Saving Private Ryan”)

Half my family lives there and while there was serious looting, (the tsunami destroyed the neighboring naval and marine base) soon the heroes overcame the looters. In Chile firefighters are an all volunteer force, working ad honorum, composed mostly by young professionals, and at the first hour, when our now former President hesitated to let the Armed Forces take control, they were Chile’s best. A cousin of mine is a volunteer in the Seventh Engine, the “German Engine” or “Siebte Feuerwehrkompanie” of Concepcion. He’s an outstanding guy, I love him as he was my brother, and in a certain way he is (my Mom’s sister – his mom - married one of my Dad’s first cousins), he’s 35, a triathlete, a skier and former equestrian, and as was one of the first to get into a collapsed building in Concepcion to rescue the people inside. When he was relieved from rescue work, he went to fight 2 fires started by looters and one ignited by the quake itself, at the Chemistry faculty of the Concepcion University.

He worked for 50 hours in a row, and when he went home to catch some sleep, he could not.

I get very emotional every time I recount this. I was worried cause I know how reckless he can be, and when I finally could speak to him on the phone, (3 days after the shake) I warned him: “Don’t run too many risks, remember you’ve a wife and 3 kids”, and he said: “But I have to do it, what if the kid to be rescued would be Oscarito or Adriancito (our 7 y.o. sons)” I could’nt rebuke his point. He personally rescued a 7 year old kid, alive, trapped between two slabs of concrete, while his parents were waiting in agony outside. He said that was his pay.

That’s what the people of my country is made of, and we will build again, and build even better, knowing that another big earthquake looms in the future, but that has shaped our character and moral fiber, weeding out the weak and the lazy ones. After all Chile would not be Chile without a little shake from time to time.

Good by, God bless you all.

Oscar

Glad you and yours are safe Oscar
God Bless you and your cousin - the future needs such men.

Oscar, very glad to hear from you. I'll echo Dusan's sentiments, and I'm relieved to read that you and your family have come out of this okay.

Great to know you are well Oscar.
Some of my journalism colleagues whent to Concepcion and saw all sort of crazy stuff going on until the armed forces reinstated order.

By the way, just to give a sense of these things, the 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile was 500 times, that's right, 500 times, more powerful in terms of energy than the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti.

That's not to state that the Haitian quake was minor. In terms of destruction, it was horrible.

But in terms of shear force, the recent Chilean one was massive in the extreme.

The earlier 1960 quake was 200 times more powerful that the 8.8 one that struck this year.

It's claimed that that even more powerful quakes have occurred on earth, but have not been measured, as they were prior to the ability to do that. But certainly they can't be much more powerful. The 8.8 quake was so powerful it actually slightly impacted the tilt of the earth, and the speed of the earth's rotation. It actually sped it up slightly, so the day is now a few seconds shorter than it was prior to the quake.

Scary.

We will have to work faster then Pat to get everything done.

Thanks to all of you for your concern.

There´s pretty good information for non spanish speakers on this website. with links to U.S. press publications:

http://www.thisischile.cl/frmContenidos.aspx?id=3020&sec=419&eje=PortadaPrincipal&itz=&t=The-eyes-of-the-world-are-on-Chile-following-earthquake

Good bye friends,

Oscar