Clustered around the television at the San Antonio Bakery in Astoria, dozens of anxious people watched National Television of Chile’s 24-hour coverage of the earthquake that struck the highly seismic nation at 3:34 a.m. local time on Saturday, February 27 – rattling millions out of bed.
Business owner Ruben Guzman thought that after news of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake spread among the Chileans of Queens, everyone would stay home. Instead, his Chilean bakery became the hub that kept the community informed.
“The people have come and I thought they wouldn’t,” said Guzman who opened the bakery and coffee shop at 36-02 Astoria Boulevard two years ago. “However, people have come to share news, since the communications have been very bad. At our location in Long Island, we’ve seen the same thing.”
As of March 1, the National Office of Emergency within the Ministry of the Interior (ONEMI) has so far confirmed a death toll of 723, of which 544 came from Maule in Chile’s seventh region – the closest landfall to the quake’s offshore epicenter – and 175 miles south of the nation’s capital of Santiago.
However, Chileans in Queens who have received information about loved ones via the Internet or mobile phones, still worried because of the lack of electricity, water and food in some of the affected regions and the lack of access on the national roadways.
Two million people in total have been directly affected by the tremor.
After the collapse of their living room, dining room and bathroom walls, Nancy Janet Morales Saldaño’s extended family now sleeps in a neighbor’s house. The Elmhurst resident’s communication with the coastal city of Valparaiso, about 82 miles west of Santiago, has been intermittent because of the lack of electricity.
“That’s why the phones don’t work,” she said.
Another worry for her family has been the lack of communication with her 26-year-old cousin, Mario Saldaña, a scuba instructor on the Island of Juan Fernandez – a popular tourist destination. The end of February marked the tail end of Chile’s summer season. The family heard from him at 6 a.m. the morning of the quake, but not since. ONEMI has declared eight people dead and eight missing in Juan Fernandez due to a tsunami.
Saldaño’s boyfriend, Horacio Silva, has family and friends in Valparaiso and neighboring Viña del Mar and said that he reached his uncles and nieces via the Internet and Instant Messaging. He said his nephew, Francisco, had just come from New York with two electrical generators – the nephew has a music radio station in Chile – and that’s what they’ve used for electricity.
“It’s been terrible without gasoline or light,” Silva said, adding that his family’s home had not been affected. “But since he had the generators he was able to connect.”
The strength of much of the construction in Chile has contributed to a lower death count despite the gravity of the quake, estimated to be hundreds of times more powerful than the 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on January 12 that killed over 230,000.
Also, the fact that the quake took place offshore helped keep the numbers low.
Former Astoria resident Oscar Ortega, who now lives in Viña del Mar, slept through the first 20 seconds of the earthquake.
“I just thought it was like previous quakes, where it shakes just a little,” Ortega told The Queens Courier over the video/telephone application Skype around 1:30 p.m. the Saturday after the quake. He sat in his home office and said the power had been restored 30 minutes earlier.
But his girlfriend woke him up and then grabbed their one-year-old daughter and ran for cover underneath the bedroom doorframe. Ortega ran after them and he said he just held them tight.
Ortega described – and showed with his hands – the entire building swayed. “But you can’t imagine the two minutes of tremor.”
“We just stayed calmed because none of the walls were falling,” he said. “Everything is fine – luckily – because we live in a well-made building that endured the quake.”
After the quake, Ortega and his family remained outside their building with neighbors and eventually he began to use his girlfriend’s phone to send emails and chat.
“I’ve slept very little,” he said.
Chile has a long history with powerful earthquakes, with 13 of magnitude 7.0 or greater since 1973. In 1960, a 9.5 earthquake – the largest registered in the past 200 years – took place approximately 143 miles south of this one and claimed 1,600 lives. That quake created a tsunami that took another 200 lives in Japan, Hawaii and the Philippines.
A tsunami warning issued in the Pacific was eventually cancelled. However in Chile, a tsunami swept over the seacoast town of Constitucion, north of the epicenter, and 350 people have been confirmed dead.
Though at first the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said that international assistance would not be needed, her government has asked for the global community’s help to restore the communication network in the affected five regions. The Chilean Red Cross has been sent to the disaster areas and they’ve asked medical personal from across the country to help.
Despite being thousands of miles away, Chileans in the San Antonio Bakery discussed how they will continue to monitor the situation and do what they can to help those back home.
“My sister had already planned to go in March,” said Saldaña, who’s lived in the U.S. for 10 years, but travels back to Chile every year. “And we’ve already started preparing the two boxes we are going to send the family.”
