Earthquake!

Today is Chile’s Fiestas Patrias, or their Independence Day and it is also my assistant Sara’s bday!! We came back from trapping to find that we had power again! I also found a new very large (hopefully pregnant) female! So it was an all around good day.

On Wednesday night around 8pm I felt some shaking. I assumed it was a temblor and would only last a few seconds. But it kept going…Sara hadn’t felt a temblor yet and I was about to call to her something about it. Bu then it got scary and she peeked her head in my room, and as the whole house began to move we ran outside. The power went out and I heard something break in the house. I have never felt anything like that before. The ground was moving like jello. It felt hollow beneath me, like it was about to collapse and I would just fall in. I couldn’t believe how much the house was moving. I think at least one tire of our truck was in the air throughout the earthquake.The scary part was that the cats that lived next door started sprinting up the hill by our house, and women started wailing and men started yelling to each other. That did not make me feel very safe. I did not know how long it lasted at the time, but the news stories say 3 minutes and I believe it. One of the construction workers came over and told us that it was just the first wave and more would come in the night, but that was the worst one. He said to leave our door open in the night because sometimes they get jammed shut if you close them and then you are trapped. When we were getting ready to go to bed, still a little shaken up, we were wondering if Zorro was still outside running around but then I went into my room and found him curled up on my bed, clearly a little nervous. I moved my bed away from the window and hunkered down for the night with Zorro. I felt some big shakes, sometimes they seemed almost as big as the first one and there were about 40 aftershocks throughout the night, including a magnitude 7 earthquake and a handful of magnitude 6's.. But I was actually able to sleep. We had decided not to trap in the morning since we didn’t know what condition the roads and the park would be in. It was very unsettling to keep hearing the house start rattling and feeling the rumbling of the Earth. The construction workers said that those aftershocks would continue for the next couple months since the plates will continue to butt up against one another. We have been feeling them throughout the day and night and sometimes it really makes my stomach flip. I swear animals can feel those things ahead of time, because the night before the earthquake there was one shudder (just a temblor) but the dogs were freaking out barking for the rest of the night. Zorro even went to the door and was incessantly barking in the middle of the night. The nights following the earthquake, Zorro would get into a really nervous mood and start shaking, or just Velcro himself to my body for long periods of time. Soon after there would be some really strong tremors. Poor guy.

I have been doing yoga every night for the last few weeks and I always start off on the ground thinking about something one of my yogi’s in Chattanooga always says: feel the Earth coming up to hold you, to support your body in your practice…”. Soooo that doesn’t have the same effect when the Earth is literally shaking under your body and you feel like it’s going to swallow you up. That’s how I feel when I do yoga in our house now!

The other day I was sitting cross legged at my site in the morning when I felt an aftershock there for the first time. That was crazy because the other times I was in my house, in the car, or standing on the ground. Sitting on the actually Earth and watching it move back and forth was super weird. And it made me wonder what the hell the degus must be thinking about these shakes! I feel bad that their babies are going to be born in these conditions!

That being said, we really don’t have anything to complain about. Nothing in our town or house was damaged, we still have clean drinking water, we only lost power for 2 days (and our neighbors said it would be at least a week!), and no threats of tsunamis. Our neighbors said that a nearby town that is closer to the ocean did experience some flooding and was 1 meter under water L That would be horrible.

Sara and I walked up this hill by our house the other day and found that there is a view of the ocean up there. Granted it is very far away, but I will take an ocean view any way I can!! I plan on spending more time up there as it gets sunnier and warmer. We are still having cold and cloudy days here, but with Spring right around the corner it should be really nice weather soon.

My next blog will probably be less dramatic, but who knows, maybe it will be about me finding degu pups!

Update: So we've been feeling a lot of aftershocks, and apparently 2 more earthquakes on Saturday, one this morning and just now in the cafe we felt a 6.5 earthquake.