OT - Claudio González

To all my dear good friends abroad who have worried about me these days,

I had thought yesterday of opening a thread saying that all was well with us, but then I thought it wasn't really proper to do so, and I did nothing. This thread, opened by our good Hopper, gives me the oportunity to write a few lines about what happened here.

This was the second largest eartquake in the history of Chile, and it was peculiar in many ways. First, it was very long. This, and the fact that it came at about 3:35 in the morning with an almost instantaneous cut off all electric power, made it all the more frightening. It was a relief when I could get hold of an electric torch I always keep in my bedside table to see that, excepting for a few books that had fallen from shelves, nothing at all had happened in our one story house, and there were no signs of destruction in our block. And then came the excruciating hours trying to get in contact with our closest relatives, including our son who is at a seventh floor (no harm at all either, which we only found at about 7 am) through totally saturated and collapsed telephone lines, both line and mobile. Fortunatelly, all is well with all of my relatives and closest friends.

The second peculiarity of this quake was the really very large area severely affected by it, and the degree of destruction it carried, all of which we could only begin gauging properly at about 9-10 am when TV channels started transmitting again. And then, in spite of this destruction, the number of casualties was extremely low, a little over 200 people dead according to the last official report on last night, which is almost unbelievable for all the houses and buildings that went down.

We have had very many replicas, perhaps the strongest one right now when I'm writing this, but they are just short "temblores", a different word we use to name simple movements without any consequence -we call "terremotos" the really strong ones that get us in the media of the whole world. So, unless we have a second terremoto (an unlikely probability according to the experts), things were not so bad. Freely translating from what my mother used to tell us when I was a child, nothing that can be healed with money is really important.

Thank you all for caring, for your prayers which no doubt helped us, and for being such good friends.

Claudio.

Addition: I should have said the second strongest earthquake...