As you probably know (if not, Google “earthquake in Chile”), Chile's been struck by an earthquake approx. 8.8 in the Richter scale in the region near Concepción. I live in Santiago, and we have also been affected by this unfortunate event.
(Following comes from this Wesnoth.org forum post, now missing due to the former autopruning mechanism.)
I am OK right now, but I got trapped in the house during the earthquake (I was in the bathroom and some _really_ heavy objects were in the way to the kitchen, which is the closest way to exit from my bedroom) and thought I wouldn't be able to get out in time. I did (about right at the end of the earthquake, not knowing at the moment if its intensity would continue increasing...), but we are not sure whether the house deteriorated further* or not and do not really believe it'd resist a real earthquake with epicenter near Santiago.
There's a good distance between Concepción and Santiago, so it was about 7 in the Richter scale in Santiago according to the authorities last time I checked — about 10 am via FM radio on the car, we didn't have electricity, tap water or Internet at all until around 2 pm and I fell asleep around 1:16 pm after being unable to sleep the whole night with the strong and continuous tremors that followed. I originally posted this around 6:40 pm.
While everything's fine for us here right now, sadly, other areas of this same region didn't have this luck. Including areas where some of our family lives.
Naturally, everything to the south is chaos according to the news and there are still isolated people in coastal areas closer to the epicenter.
* (To elaborate, this wood house was built on 2000-2001. However, we know that the concrete floor structure wasn't properly finished or secured, there are cracks everywhere that have appeared over time since we moved here; heck, I've even seen grass grow in the middle of my bedroom in 2002. The wood structure of the second floor isn't finished and there are heavy materials left above since a few days ago that made me worry that the house would fall on me when I was walking into the approximate center of gravity in middle of the earthquake, hearing them dancing on the floor (huh) above. All the animals are nervous after the earthquake but everyone's okay and I'm thankful for that.)
***
There are still tremors as of this writing. There was a small one which cut the power lines for 1 second some minutes ago, followed by a stronger one with lots of underground noise. The movement pattern continues being the same as the original earthquake. Internet is flaky.
If anyone's really interested in speaking to me, I've temporarily opened ##shadowm on irc.freenode.net.
