Personal Traumas

Our concerns now are for the dead, missing, and injured. The death toll is officially about 800, but will surely rise. The daughter of one of our friends was pulled unconscious, but alive and well from the rubble of a discotheque where over 900 Chilean young people were celebrating the end of summer (Chileans party late). The son of one of our friend's friends, however, lost both arms in the discotheque and is now in a medically induced coma while the swelling in his brain goes down. Doctors were able to reattach one arm, but won't know how successful the operation has been until he recovers. "It puts the loss of our wine in perspective" our friend told us.

One of the professors at the Universidad de Santiago where Dick works was not so fortunate. He called his daughter, a graduate student doing research in biology on the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile, immediately after the quake to tell her to get to higher ground. She checked with the navy station on the island and was told that there would be no tsunami, so she didn't take her father's advice. She hasn't been found, but is assumed drowned in the tsunami that devastated the islands.

The wife of one of Dick's colleagues was staying at her mother's house in the small coastal village of Curanipe about 10 miles from the epicenter. Being the wife of a geologist, and a geologist herself, she had the family loaded in the back of a pickup headed for high ground even before the quake stopped. The tsunami, which hit her village just a few minutes after the quake, stopped a mere two feet from their house. Many people farther from the epicenter did not fair as well. Tsunamis are difficult to predict precisely. A false report was issued after the quake saying that there would be no tsunami causing some people not to evacuate and others evacuated but then returned before the tsunami hit sometimes as much as 2 hours later depending on distance from the epicenter and the angle of the beach.

Near the town of Constitución, 300 teenagers and young adults were camped on an island celebrating the end of summer. Only the eight who where able to climb trees and hang on, survived.