Chile Earthquake - Tsunami Reconnaissance Day 4

Saturday March 27
Drove from Santiago to Concepción today – a distance of about 300 miles and a latitude change equivalent to going from the Salton Sea to Santa Cruz. It was my first chance to see the Chilean country side. The first part of the drive reminded me a lot of the Beaumont – Banning area and Concepción area seems very like the San Mateo coast. Chile turns your head around both in terms of directions and in seasons. It is a very linear country – the populated corridor bounded by the Andes and the coastal range. Sebastian says that people give directions according to North, South, Up, and Down. It’s just past the autumn equinox, days are getting short and one of the consequences of the earthquake is that the switch from Daylight Savings time to Standard time was postponed a few weeks to help the reconstruction effort.

As we drove south, earthquake damage became more prevalent. At first we only noticed some cracks along the road margins and soil slips on bridge overpass abutments. Then the road damage became more severe, some bridges completely down, and noticeable damage to adobe buildings. In Curicó, all of the adobe buildings appeared to be damaged, many tiles were off roofs, and piles of debris still sat on sidewalks. But it is still impressive how many structures are undamaged.

The reason for our detour into Curicó was in pursuit of an interview with the policeman who helped to save Iloca. Iloca is a small coastal village about 50 miles away from Curicó. We had read in the newspapers how this policeman had helped to save the people of Iloca by using his bullhorn to urge people to go to high ground. I’ve been interested in local tsunami heroes for some time and I really wanted to see if we could find this person and learn what had motivated him to take the actions he did. The problem – he was no longer stationed in Iloca. Much of the year only a few hundred people live there but during the summer, vacationers swell the ranks to over a thousand. Rather than maintain year-round police force large to handle the summer visitors, police from neighboring municipalities are rotated in to help coastal towns like Iloca in the peak periods. Our policeman was one of these extra summer officials. Fortunately, the newest member of our team is Francisco (Pancho) Luna. Pancho is a Childhood friend of Sebastian’s and an investigative journalist. It took him about ten phone calls and 45 minutes to track down his whereabouts and lead us into the heart of Curicó.

What ensued was an extraordinary interview. We spent over a half hour listening to his story and it will take us some time to complete a transcript and pull out all of the details, but there are several points that emerged right away. First, he had no particular training in tsunamis or earthquakes. He was from an inland community and had no cultural history or oral tradition about tsunamis. But he had been stationed in Valparaiso for 5 years during the time that tsunami hazard signs had been posted there. He had also participated in a number of drills and training exercises for other types of emergencies. Tsunami signs had also recently been posted in Iloca. In the early morning hours of February 27, he was able to see the ocean quite clearly because of the full moon. He didn’t immediately associate the strong ground shaking with a tsunami (the Valparaiso signs didn’t mention earthquakes), but he noticed the water becoming agitated and that reminded him of the signs so he organized the other police and they notified the town. He also had the instinct to keep people in the evacuation area until he got official notification that the danger period had passed. As a result of his actions, no one died and no one got hurt even though the town was destroyed.