I was waiting for a taxi with some friends in the plaza of Santiago's historic Barrio Brasil after a few hours of energetic and sweaty dancing to Cumbia music, when I felt a metro train pass, rumbling the tarmac and making the trees in the plaza shake. Then I realised, quicker than realising, that the metro had stopped running hours before - and the shaking didn't pass, it just got stronger.
Being lightly refreshed, the details are fuzzy, but I believe I shouted "Get on the ground!" at this point and threw myself into the road, away from the trees on Plaza Brasil. I lay on the undulating tarmac with my face in a puddle holding CD's hand, waiting for the ground to split, or to be crushed by a falling branch. It felt like a moment of dark, shuddering silence before the sirens started and cars sped down Avenida Brasil taking Santiaguinos back to their families, unhindered by traffic lights which had cut out along with the rest of the lights.
The main shock of the earthquake lasted for nearly two incredible minutes, and it was followed by panic as we sat up and saw the rubble fallen from the buildings around the plaza. People running away from home, towards home, gathering in the Plaza with their scared, barking dogs. My friends, a couple, kissed and hugged whilst I phoned the boy, who lives on the 15th floor of an apartment block. He was outside the block - the residents of all 22 floors had run down the stairs and gone outside in their nightclothes. I begged him to get away from the block and the phone cut out. That was the start of communication problems which are still continuing.
As people gathered in the Plaza, so did the rumours. We couldn't walk through the centre because there were fires and looting. Areas of Santiago had been flattened. Another, bigger earthquake was about to happen. An old house on the North side of Plaza Brasil had collapsed, with an entire family inside. I tried to call the boy again, to tell him to go to my house, get out of the street, but could only get an Out of Service message. I had skinned my knee and my palm diving into the road, but it didn't start to hurt until this afternoon.
We talked to locals in the park and I petted a pitbull that strained on its leash and barked with terror. All the taxis had gone, buses drove past quickly with their lights off. We waited an hour or so, thinking of what to do. AL dozed against a bollard. We would have to walk.
Walking on the traffic island to stay away from the buildings, a palm-lined, grassy strip which usually makes me feel like having a cocktail, we walked through a silent and dark Barrio Brasil. Where a few minutes before there had been open bars flashing neon lights, now everything was shuttered and the pavements were cluttered with rubble and broken glass. On the Alameda, the main street of Santiago which dissects the city from East to West, people were walking silently home.
The boy sent me messages periodically. I urged him to go to my house, a bungalow which has survived many earthquakes, rather than stay near his flimsy block. He replied saying that he was coming to get me. My companions left me to go to their home in Bellas Artes, so I walked the last stretch of the Alameda towards Plaza Italia, Santiago's psychological centre and site of many teargassings after football matches, by myself. As I came to the corner of Lastarria and Alameda I saw a building whose scaffolding had collapsed like a giant game of pick-up-sticks. As I waited for the boy to arrive, a group of young men picked up the scaffolding poles and started using them to smash the windows of the adjoining row of shops. The Carabineros (uniformed police) were hot on their heels but I can only imagine similar scenes went on in less heavily policed areas.
As they ran off, the boy called my name from the dark. I have never been so happy to see someone, and squeeze someone, in my whole life. We walked home down Vicuña MacKenna past a church with a half-collapsed tower, but with the Virgin Mary still standing in her niche, as the sun began to rise. It's almost enough to make one take up God - but he's got to answer for the apartment blocks in Barrio Maipu which weren't made to earthquake proofing regulations before that's going to happen.
Chile is located on the Ring of Fire, which sounds like the basis for a public schoolboy's hilarious curry-related joke, but is actually the area which surrounds the pacific basin and in which 90% of the world's earthquakes occur (according to Wikipedia). Chile makes up the south-east leg of the the Ring of Fire, which gives the country beautiful landscapes such as the volcanoes of the South, but also means that Chile owns the title for No. 1 largest earthquake, a 9.5 in 1960, and now the prize for No. 5 too thanks to last night's 8.8 treat (US Geological Survey).
I have been in the house all day watching the news with my housemates - every half an hour or so there is another aftershock, some worse than others. I can't imagine the strain of this kind of thing happening before internet, before mobile phones - waiting for the post every day to find out who is safe. I have spoken or written to both of my parents, my brother and sister, an uncle and many friends today. Along with shocking images of plastic-wrapped bodies being lifted from collapsed buildings and the broken relics of flyovers and motorways all over the country, Piñera, the centre-right President Elect of Chile, has been making soundbites all day, one of which bemoaned the loss of millions of pesos... once a businessman, always a businessman: thinking of the economy while the death count is 214 and rising.
Chile's aim to become a developed capitalist country is now further away than ever as much of the country's road network will have to be rebuilt along with an estimated 50,000 homes. The Huffington Post printed a list of ways to make aid donations here.
Please donate whatever you can, we lost a bottle of rum in the quake and I need an extremely stiff drink, as well as some savlon and a plaster for my knee.
3 comments:
great msg for me, thanks a lot dude˙﹏˙
thank for share, it is very important .￣︿￣
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