Last Saturday Chileans suffered the worst earthquake in 50 years. With an intensity of 8.8 it was the fifth biggest in world history. The violent displacement and friction of the continental plate provoked not only a massive earth movement but also a devastating tsunami. Fishing boats dragged by waves of eight meters to the centre of southern Chilean coastal cities conjure up images of apocalyptical dimensions.
At the time of writing more than 700 people are dead and the toll keeps on rising. There are hundreds of people missing. One and a half million are homeless and there is major destruction to infrastructure, especially bridges, ports, airports and hospitals.
The earthquake struck on the last weekend of the summer holidays. Like every other year thousands of Chileans were returning home. In Chile, March is a month when life comes back to normal. Back to school. Back to work. Not this March. It has become a month of sorrow and burials.
Chile is a land of earthquakes and they have been merciless with this long, thin country squashed into a 180 km wide corridor between the magnificent Andes and the Pacific Ocean. Chile is located in the highly seismic 'Pacific Ring of Fire.'
Is it trembling? Chileans casually query each other — almost as a daily greeting — while dim and sometimes imperceptible tremors shake the earth underneath. Chileans live with these tremors and seldom express fear. They are used to them. At least until something so cataclysmic — as last weekend's earthquake — occurs.
Earthquakes are deeply engraved in Chilean identity. Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda was so moved by the 1960 earthquake of 9.5 that destroyed the southern city of Valdivia that he felt compelled to write 'Earthquake in Chile, the Barcarola':
'For the fallen walls, the weeping in the sad hospital, for the streets covered by rubble and fear, for the bird that flies without a tree and the dog that howls without eyes, motherland of water and wine, daughter and mother of my soul, allow me to blend with you in the wind and tears so that the same enraged destiny obliterates my body and my land.'
The violence of the earth in Chile also drew German novelist Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (1777–1811) to write 'The Earthquake in Chile', a story of two lovers caught up