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Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Eagle

Chile earthquake shakes AU students abroad; all are safe

Commentary

SANTIAGO, Chile — At first I thought it was just the loud music of the club, or that I had possibly had too much to drink. My second thought was that the vibrating dance floor was some sort of cool Chilean special effect.

Within a few seconds however, the shaking picked up and it was obvious that something was wrong. The dance floor was pitching up and down and people started screaming and clutching their friends for dear life. I grabbed onto the edge of the bar just to keep from falling over.

After about a minute, the shaking stopped and everyone rushed down the stairs and out of the club. The street outside was complete chaos, with people screaming and running in all directions. I was separated from my friends, so I started pushing my way through the crowd trying to find them. At one point, I tripped over someone’s foot and had to be helped up by a couple of Chileans.

Then I heard someone calling my name and looked over to see Nacha, my host sister, and Roman, her boyfriend. They grabbed my hands, obviously more worried about my safety than I had been. “Hubo un terremoto,” Roman said. Translation: there was an earthquake.

As Nacha drove us back to her house, we passed a few buildings that seemed to be sagging slightly into the piles of rubble at their bases. A crash scene on one area of the highway was blocked off with several ambulances that surrounded a twisted and destroyed car.

The rest of my host family was waiting up for us when we got home, somewhere around 4 or 4:30 a.m. Power across the city had gone out, so we sat drinking juice around the kitchen table in the glow of a flashlight. Laughing, my host father told us how the cat had screamed when the ground started shaking and that his first reaction had been to grab the plasma TV and make sure it didn’t break.

I did not realize until I saw news coverage the next morning just how bad the earthquake had been. Santiago, where I am staying, is about 200 miles from the quake’s epicenter in Southern Chile. Damage in the city was nothing compared to the images from further south I saw shown all day on every TV station.

All the students on AU’s Santiago study abroad program have been accounted for, according to an e-mail Study Abroad Adviser Brita Doyle sent to students and parents of students in the program.

While there was not extensive damage to Santiago, there were still several fatalities in the city. While it sounds bad to say, however, when everything started shaking at around 3:30 a.m., I was more confused and kind of excited than scared. It did not occur to me until later that I should have been scared. Nacha and Roman even made fun of me later for being so relaxed about the whole thing.

After reading all the news, however, I realize now the AU students here are all very lucky nothing happened to us or even to any of our houses. Not everyone was so lucky, and those in Southern Chile need all the help they can get.

You can reach this staff writer at mkendall@theeagleonline.com.


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