Strong earthquake hits Chile

Giovanni Carraro in the VLT control room.

I guess that by today you all know about the catastrophic earthquake that struck Chile last Friday. My colleague, ESO astronomer Michael Dumke has already published a post about this.

I have been living in Chile for two years, working as a postdoctoral fellow in La Silla, and I have many colleagues and friends that live there. I just had a long phone call with my old friend and best man Giovanni Carraro, whom I know since the years of university in Padua. He is now in Cerro Paranal, observing at UT2. He tells me ESO observatories do not report any damage. They were out of phone/internet reach for some time, but now things are back to normal. At the time of the quake he was at the telescope, but he did not feel the ground shaking. The VLT control building is in fact very elastic. He became aware of the catastrophe only twelve hours later, fortunately. By that time, in fact, some of the connections were fixed and he could talk to his family in Santiago. The situation was chaotic, but none of ESO people was injured. No internet and normal phone connection, problems with drinkable water, chaos in the supermarkets to buy food and so on. With the airport closed and many roads seriously damaged, connections to Santiago are very difficult. Although the situation is still critical, I now feel a bit better. When I got the bad news I was in Italy, in my home village. We were struck by an earthquake in 1976, which caused about 1000 dead, 40 on my village. And that was only 6.3 Richter. I was only ten at that time, but I have a very vivid recollection of what happened. In a few seconds I could see all those apocalyptic scenes. Smoke and dust, screams, and most scaring of all, the continuous growls coming from the depths. And I was imagining the anxiety of my colleagues up on the mountain, 1200 km away from their families living in Santiago, with no news about their conditions and thereabouts. It must have been terrible…

All our thoughts now go to the Chilean population, especially the poor people in Concepcion and in the towns which have been devastated by the tsunami wave on the Chilean coast.