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32: Aftershock
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254 32 Aftershock Cahuil, Chile, 2010 Never had I witnessed anything like this before, though I had heard of earthquakes. I found myself rocking on my horse and I moved to and fro with him like a child in a cradle, expecting the ground to open at any moment and reveal an abyss to engulf me and all around me. —John James Audubon Not until the afternoon of their first day on the coast did Rob Witter realize he and Laurie would actually be doing all the driving in Chile. “I can drive,” Leonardo had assured his companions as they filled out the paperwork at the rental car agency in Santiago that morning. And he could—as long as the car was an automatic. Which the little Toyota Yaris they had rented wasn’t. Rob, a forty-two-year-old father of three young daughters, had felt like the dad after Leonardo climbed behind the wheel at Pichilemu, talking Leonardo through the curves in the road to Cahuil: “OK, now let out the clutch, easy …” The next five days were going to be long enough without Leonardo grinding the gears at every change of grade; no need to add driving lessons to the itinerary. And Leonardo had something more important to contribute than driving. Given Rob’s and Laurie’s limited Spanish, Leonardo’s translation skills would be essential. Witter, jetlagged and low on sleep less than twenty-four hours after his arrival, was still surprised to find himself in Chile. Not nearly as surprised as the Chilean people had been sixteen days earlier—Feb. 27, 2010—when a magnitude 8.8 earthquake had shattered the pre-dawn stillness and generated a tsunami that swept the beaches and tore through port towns along three hundred miles of Chile’s central coast. Some 521 people had been killed, most of them by the quake itself; quake-savvy Chileans had generally known to run uphill. This would be the first of two trips to Chile for Rob in 2010, as it turned out. He had already been planning a trip in aftershock 255 May to Viña del Mar, where he was to give a talk sponsored by the USGS on the work he was doing in Oregon, updating the work his predecessor, George Priest, had started more than fifteen years earlier, using more recent fieldwork and more sophisticated computer modeling to determine the theoretical upper limit of run-up from a local tsunami along that state’s coastline: basically, re-drawing the evacuation line people should run toward after an earthquake. Then the Chilean quake struck, and he had been invited to join an ad hoc group of scientists and other quake specialists for some immediate post-quake fieldwork. Members of the Geo-Engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance team had assembled the night before at an office on Magdalena Street in downtown Santiago. That’s where Rob had first met the other members of his sub-group: Leonardo Dorador, a grad student in the Geophysics Institute at the Universidad de Chile, and Laurie Johnson, a risk management consultant from San Francisco. Their assignment: spend five days on the country’s south-central coast surveying land-level changes— uplift and subsidence—caused by the tectonic forces that had also triggered the magnitude 8.8 quake. They had gotten an early start the next morning, renting the car and stocking up on supplies and groceries in Santiago. It had been slightly more than two weeks since the earthquake and tsunami, and the coast was still in disarray. Many of the businesses not destroyed by the quake and tsunami were now closed, and few hotels were operating. Martial law was in effect in the larger coastal cities; unless they could find lodging and check in before the 9 p.m. curfew, they would need to be out of town and on their way back over the mountains on broken roads at the end of the day in order to find a place to sleep—then go back the next day. The drive to the coast that first morning—about twice as far as the distance from Portland to Cannon Beach or Seaside, Rob judged—took hours, between slowdowns for road repairs and detours along alternate routes and over temporary bridges. And this in a country engineered to deal with quakes, he found himself thinking. Oregon will not fare so well. They reached the coast at Pichilemu, the northernmost of the Chilean towns severely damaged by...