News from Chile

I was once in a very small earthquake. Staying with friends in Alaska, I was in the bath at the time, and the earthquake was more or less over before I realised what was happening. The first thing I'd noticed was a huge banging noise, which turned out to be caused by some of the trees which grew very close to this new, wooden house (built on stilts driven into gravel, precisely to protect the building against earthquakes). As both house and trees vibrated in the quake, they hammered against one another in a much louder, faster and more relentless rhythm than any human could achieve. Then I felt the shaking right underneath me, saw ripples spreading in the bathwater, and remembered that Alaska, like the rest of Pacific Rim, is subject to frequent earthquakes. In reflecting on my own feelings about this fairly minor incident, what interested me was the realisation that any sense of danger (and you DO feel rather vulnerable in a bathroom, as Hitchcock knew) was as nothing compared to the shock and horror one feels when the ground itself suddenly acquires an apparent power of agency. That the very earth could without warning start smashing trees into the wall of the house in a massive, seemingly deliberate percussion, was about as scary as your favourite armchair suddenly turning round and telling you to fuck off, or a dish really jumping up and running off with a spoon. Later I was gratified to discover that Darwin's reaction to the Chilean earthquake of 1835 was rather similar:

"An earthquake like this at once destroys the oldest associations; the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, moves beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid; one second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never create." (quoted today by John van Wyhe at cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/01/vanwyhe.quake.chile.darwin.)

All this has been called to mind by my friend Roberto in Valparaiso, whose email sent on Saturday has only just reached me and which I have been translating from the Spanish as best I can (it's nearly 20 years since I was last in Chile and I've forgotten most of the little Spanish I knew).

He and his wife and daughter were woken up at 3.30 that morning by "an infernal noise": books were shuffling off the shelves, lamps and vases crashing to the floor, but it was "the feeling that the vibration under you feet would never end" that was really terrible. Their house however withstood the shock. They huddled together on the first floor landing before escaping to their patio where they have a "refuge" especially for such events, and where they could get some news on a battery radio. Roberto's mobile could get a signal long enough for him to contact his son Gonzalo in Talca (even closer to the epicentre than Concepcion): he was all right, but soon the mobile networks were saturated and further communication was impossible.

Roberto was able to check that the nearby building where his 86-year-old mother lives alone on the 9th floor was still there and the structure was safe; then all they could do was wait for the dawn. At around 4.00 in the afternoon the electricity and TV were restored, and they could start to get a real sense of what had happened. First thing - in typical Chilean fashion - was to go to the corner shop for bread. Already many people were panic-buying, driven by fear rather than any evidence that it might be necessary. Valparaiso is a long way from the epicentre, and the shocks there were, we are told in today's paper, merely "strong".

Some Chileans wearily anticipate that foreigners will imagine their situation to be the same as that in Haiti. Not only is Chile much better prepared for earthquakes and much better organised than Haiti, the problems are also different. As we have heard here on the news, Roberto mentions the the bridges: Chile is a long narrow country between the Andes and the sea, so is crossed by hundreds of rivers: even though only 1% of the bridges have been destroyed, he says, this has a disproportionate effect on communications and thus on rescue. He also claims that people in tsunami danger zones had moved out in time; however, it seems from the news here that many remoter places have indeed suffered badly from the tsunami that followed the earthquake.

After sending his email Roberto was about to go to the centre of Valparaiso to see for himself what had happened, and he promises more news later. I'll be ready with my dictionary.