CEE professor experiences Chilean quake firsthand

I am not sure my story is that exciting. In the area where I live (and driven around) there has been very little damage—a testimony to the good building codes enforced in the capital. We experienced an 8.0 in Santiago while the epicenter—about 200 miles south of us—had an 8.8. My wife and I awoke at 3:30 a.m. on Saturday morning to our 13-story apartment building shaking. We are on the 7th floor. It was obvious to us it was an earthquake and we ran to the rooms of our three kids.

I recall not being able to move much during the most intense moments of the quake and probably some of it was just fear since there were a lot of noises from things breaking, car alarms going off, the church bell one block away ringing like crazy. I clearly thought that the apartment building was going to fall down based on the motion that we were experiencing. Once the shaking stopped, which I believe was around a minute (seemed much longer), we left our apartment for the ground floor.

All the power in the city was now off except for emergency lights we saw on buildings.

After 15 minutes in the lobby of our building we decided to go back our apartment since no one else came down from the other apartments, for some reason[?]. We saw an older neighbor and he assured us that this was the most powerful earthquake he had ever felt. We listened to the radio briefly and learned it was greater than an 8.0, which frightened us even more that we actually survived that magnitude of the earthquake. Looking out our windows, we didn't notice any fallen buildings immediately after the earthquake but air had a heavy smell of dust. We tried to sleep after the earthquake but there were a lot of aftershocks that were unnerving to us and our children.

In the late morning my former PhD student, Erwin Kohler, reached me and invited us to his house in the hills of Santiago. Ironically he and his family had power, water, and gas. We drove to his house and contacted our family who had been frantically trying to reach us. We stayed with him for the next 24 hours so that our nerves could be calmed. There was still too much shaking in our 7th floor apartment. Later that day, we were able to reach other American families here on Fulbrights and sabbaticals, as well as Chilean colleagues. Everyone we knew in the city had survived the quake.

There is some damage in Santiago and several fallen bridges and damage buildings especially in the older parts of town. The region most affected is south of the city and towards the coast. I think the majority of population is coping well and there are not widespread problems as reported on the U.S. news. Obviously, in the most damaged cities near the epicenter there are security and food supply problems, but it is very localized. Most stores have been open the whole time since the earthquake . I have noticed all the gas stations are closed near where I live since they are out of gas.

Photo of the collapsed mall wall.

The airport has very limited service. I was actually supposed to fly to Uruguay today and they have indefinitely suspended all international flights originating from Santiago.

According to the local media in Chile, most of the damage occurred near the epicenter where the buildings did not use known earthquake resistant designs. The buildings are older and generally it is poorer and thus construction materials are generally fired-clay bricks and in many cases still adobe brick.

In the final analysis, I think they will learn that many people died from the Tsunamis that were generated after the earthquake, which probably should have been preventable. Many of the cities have designated Tsunami evacuation routes. The local media has been reporting that in many towns the officials did not evacuate the people following the earthquake for some reason. 

Roesler took this photo in the downtown Santiago office of TC Pavements, a company he had done research with at Illinois.

Thankfully the death toll is quite low compared to Haiti. Haiti experienced a 7.0 earthquake while this one was an 8.8, which means approximately 500 to 800 times more energy was released. Currently, the most affected areas are not accessible and without a stable gas supply there is no way to reach the affected area. A Chilean company, that I had been doing research for at Illinois, had its office damaged pretty severely from the quake but they were on the 10th floor of in an older building. Another interesting engineering fact is that Santiago is currently building the Torre Gran Costanera that will be the tallest building in South America (at 300 meters) and second tallest in the southern hemisphere.

The country is changing governments (new president) on March 11, which I think may have complicated some of the relief efforts. My wife and I are currently looking for opportunities to assist. She actually graduated with a MS in civil and environmental engineering from Illinois and was in the U.S. Coast Guard for 10 years. I hope to use my expertise in concrete materials and pavement/road engineering to assist with any type of infrastructure assessments. I am not an earthquake engineer nor a structural engineer, so I have begun to contact people here to assist our department head, Amr Elnashai, and the Mid-America Earthquake Center, to allow a team to come down here and assist, and learn from this earthquake, preparedness schemes, and emergency response following the quake.

Roesler is on sabbatical at the Catholic University (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile) of Chile in the Department of Construction Engineering and Management. He received a Fulbright Scholarship with the objective of developing better predictions of the life of concrete roads as well as design and construction of more cost effective concrete pavements for South America.

An Illinois alumnus (BS, MS, PhD, Civil Engineering) Roesler joined the Illinois faculty in August 2000. His professional and research interests include concrete pavement design and analysis, shrinkage and creep of concrete, fatigue and fracture of concrete, continuously reinforced concrete pavements, effects of curling and warping on concrete pavement responses, characterizing concrete joint behavior, accelerated pavement testing of PCC, and fibrous concrete.
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