Chile searches for survivors, life returns to normal in shaken Santiago

Andrew Ford is a 22-year-old mass communication and journalism major from Eagle traveling through South America. He’s currently living in Santiago, Chile and you can follow him on twitter @barefootford or you can visit his Web site, BarefootFord.com.

ANDREW FORD/THE ARBITER - Children wait outside their home while their parents go inside to retrieve possessions.

February 27, 4:30 a.m., Santiago, Chile.

My friends are safe and it looks like there isn’t any major destruction nearby. The only thing I can think of in Spanish to explain how I feel is “El terremoto es muy fuerte…” I hear many residents start conversation with others with basically that. I agree.

I go back inside my apartment.

Nothing quite like sitting up in your bed feeling the aftershock of an earthquake far from home. I’ve been through small earthquakes, but usually they’re so small I don’t notice them or I just sleep through them.

The last one I really remember being scared about was when I was young and living in California. I remember the shakes and knowing to run to the doorway, then once it stopped, running to my parents’ room. My whole family, all six of us, somehow fit into my parents’ bed to watch the news and see what happened.

Tonight, there won’t be any news updates for me and certainly won’t be any cuddling with my parents.

Ah… another aftershock… I can hear the bowls shaking in the kitchen.

When the first one hit, all 7.0+ of it, I swung open my door and just stared at the door jam while grabbing onto the wall. The shaking was so powerful it felt like my floor became liquid. During an earthquake I don’t think about much. My stomach went soft as I got shifted around on the bottom floor of a nearly 100-year-old building.

In the middle of what felt like a minute-long shake I found some peace in that it would be soon be finisheed. No earthquake lasts forever.

Another aftershock. Stronger again. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding the bowls and plates sound off in the kitchen.

Immediately after the earthquake my whole apartment smelled like sulfur. Probably a mix of old dust scattering in the air, but my thoughts changed to worrying about a gas leak or a possible fire.  There’s no automatic gas shut-off switch in an apartment heated by a large tank that looks like it’s meant for a Weber grill. My landlord came down and shut it off.

A few hours later lights turn on. The fridge just turned on — tell me we’ll have Internet back in a second, nope. (It turned back on a couple hours later, though many of the Spanish-language newspapers Web sites in Santiago were down.)

ANDREW FORD/THE ARBITER - A man cleans up rubble from the ceiling, balcony and face Saturday afternoon of a 200-year-old building battered by the earthquake.

….

Now that it’s been a couple days, for the most part it feels like life is getting back to normal. A lot of the minor damage around Santiago has been swept up or picked up, including the tiles that fell from the ceiling of my apartment 8 stories down.

Still, reminders in security tape, many businesses being closed, including the American Embassy and McDonald’s, show a powerful earthquake happened just a couple days ago. Small reminders are visible at home too; I shook a sea of dust and bits of drywall off my my dirty clothes before taking them outside to put in the washer.

It’s difficult for me to understand how lucky I am that I decided to live in Santiago, and not 100 miles south where death has been a much more prevalent factor from the quake.

I’m very lucky though, with more than 700 residents of Chile who lost their lives.

Even stranger, me and two friends were leaving at 8 a.m. the morning of the earthquake to head two hours south for her birthday to visit a tiny island that has Penguins. Had the Earthquake waited 12 hours, we would have been watching penguins while munching on cheese.

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Posted by Andrew Ford on Mar 1 2010. Filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.