EPTPart 1
After the intial conmotion, the first task was to make sure that we were all alright, we were seven playing on the table but only 6 were now on the house. Wheres Yugo? Where the fuck is Yugo? -Yo, hes there, said Fernando... You remember how I told you how Yugo had just undergone leg surgery, how he needed a cane to "walk" and was pretty much a cripple? Well, the "cripple" as soon as the earthquake started went FUCKING RUNNING to the plaza just outside his house and while we were all fearing for our lives (and his) the mother fucker just sat on a bench 20 meters aways from his home, with his cane on the side, looking to the sky like nothing and calmly, watched how all happened, all he had to say was "yeah im here"...
Lets just say we all call him "The Gazelle" nowadays.
After that, his parents quickly came down the stairs looking for him and then we all just sit there with him, slowly, all his neighbourgs would come sit on the plaza, no one wanted to stay inside.A woman started to yell "LETS JUST ALL STAY CALM, REMEMBER TO STAY CALM, STAAAAAAAAAAAY CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALMMMMMMM" and we were like "Yeah you really helps us get calm -_-". We started trying to get some radios to work to get some news, there were nones, most we could hear was some radio station from Santiago (500 kms north) who said something like "Well its seems like we just had a little eartquake.", motherfucker. After that, with still no idea of the gravity of the situation, we started joking about how our plans to have a lanparty the next day were pretty much over.
Then we heard, "You shouldnt laugh, all of your families could be dead by now...." we quickly turn around to find this small, old man that kept on saying, "This is a punishment from the Lord, he has cast this upon us because we have sinned, the Bible warned us about it!!", I looked at him with the most hate filled stare i could do and simply said "Yeah sure,BYE" and he quickly went into his house, to his side, the lady that just before was telling us to calm down, was puking her guts out.
Then came the aftershocks. After a BIG earthquake there are ALWAYS some "smaller" ones that follow. The thing is, after an 8.8 earthquake, the first 20 aftershocks were all above 7.0, and just to get it out of the way,WE STILL have one at least once a weak, but nowadays they are all around 5~. That day tough, they were all strong as fuck, and with all the adrenaline going lots of people werent able to sleep, some even for days. Weeks later you could see people that had developed this weird "eye twitch" just because of the stress.
But back to that day, it was february 27, 5 am ~, phone lines were dead, night was really dark and for an hour there was this intense fog that didnt let you see after 4-5 meters, also A LOT of dust went up in the air so it was pretty much impossible to even try to go back to our places, some lady started to say that in case of another aftershock we should go stay to a near church at least till dawn (Not because of godly protection but because the church had a basketball court so nothing could fall upon us there), I replied, "Fuck no, because if i go to there and survive, all they will say later is that god saved me, im staying here, wether i die or not, at least is up to me", in any case, no one tried to go to the church, specially when we realized all of the outer concrete walls fell on the street and trying to get there would involve jumping trough the barbed wire.
So we just sit there, smoked some cigars and tryed to hear what was going on in the radio. After catching a local signal we heard this lady from the "national emergency deparment" saying: "There has been an earhtquake, the intensity is still unknown, please remain calm, THERE IS NO RISK OF TSUNAMI, RETURN TO YOUR HOUSES. I repeat, there is NO RISK of Tsunamis, return to your houses..."
And that my friends, is how you kill 500 innocent people just by being ignorant. Cause you see, she was wrong, there was a Tsunami, a BIG FUCKING ONE.
![[image loading]](http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/8559/015aoz.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/2461/003moo.jpg)
We didnt know until later, that several islands got obliterated along with even more coast towns, most notably, Dichato, a small holiday destination 1 hour from my city. In most of this places most of the people are fishermens, so they knew when to get the fuck out of the coasts, but when the not so "sea sawy" people heard on the radio that everything was fine, they went back. And for many, it cost them their lives. I was 10 mins from Talcahuano, where this was all that was left:
It took 2 months to remove all the boats that got stranded in the city...
Now, i forgot to mention that during all this time, we were hearing some explosions in the distance, not really strong, but noticeable, we didnt really imagined what it was until the next day, when we heard that the Chemistry Faculty of my university turned into this giant BOMB and got completely destroyed by fire.
![[image loading]](http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/8291/quimicapaz.jpg)
To be continued...
To Survive
1-DONT GET ON A CAR, remember how i told you that stairs behave strangely? Well the roads turn into a fucking rally. One guy inmediately got on his car to try to go back to his place and see his mom, and before he could get on the bridge
(more on this on a later blog) part of the ramp went down with him, the car crashed and caught fire, 3 more cars also
landed on top of him. Believe or not, there were no fatalities.
![[image loading]](http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/3715/capturevgr.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/5303/dscn2534small.jpg)
Actual Car
This guy on the other side, wasnt so lucky, ill say it again, STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM WALLS.
![[image loading]](http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/3195/dsc01530n.jpg)
The driver died seconds after jumping in the car.
2-If you are near the Sea, do as the guys on Deep Impact, go as HIGH as you can, its way more important to go High than to actually get away because the water will follow the road that opposes the less resistance some days later i saw houses 10 mts from the sea that remained untouched simply because they were on a small hill, also, if there are boats on the beach GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THEM, they can be carried as far as 1 Km from the beach (Regardless of size).
3.In case of a Tsunami, dont panic, you do have time to take important stuff with you, you will see the sea "shrinking" lack of a better word) and after that you have around 10 minutes to get to safety or you are pretty much done, there were cases of people that saved themselves by hugging trees or by swimming trough the waves to get on a roof. But i can count them with my hands. The others are all bodies.
4.One last thing i forgot about debris, pretty much all the things you have in your house can knock you down, a friend that lives in an apartment tried to get to his moms room to get her out while he got stopped by a flying iron. So another reason to stay away from walls is that you usually will have desks filled with stuff that would end up going in any direction.
