8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile.

[Peps1ru1es92]

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61Q0S920100227

[The Uninvited Gremlin]

That's bad luck. I wish nothing happened to 133Mhz.

EDIT: ok, he is online xD

Good, stuff like that is crazy.

[son_ov_hades]

Such a tragedy . I've heard from my family in Chile and all are accounted for, I wish everyone was so lucky. My heart is with Chile, I love the country and its people. 

[133MHz]

Me and my family are OK, thanks for your concerns.

In Santiago, the areas that sustained the most damage were the oldest parts of the city, the ones with historical buildings and houses dating from the 19th century, which coincidentally, is where I have recently moved to (talk about Murphy's Law!).

Fortunately, my new old house only suffered minor damage in its 50+ year old electrical system, other than that, structural integrity is fine. On the other hand, a church two blocks away completely collapsed. I was peacefully sleeping at the time. We're used to small quakes on a regular basis, so I didn't really want to come out of bed when I felt that the ground was shaking. When it got worse, I got up angry and did the usual drill of standing under a door frame with my family until it stopped. I was pretty angry because it made me get up at 3 AM and I was pretty much standing asleep the whole time. It took me quite a while to fully wake up and realize what just happened. Lots of aftershocks came after that, too.

Dishes were flying around in the kitchen, our CRT TVs and LCD monitors went "Hello floor!" along with countless other things, then my closet door opened, boxes full of FC/NES/SNES/SMS/Genesis/N64 games spilled video game cartridges all over my bedroom floor, and my precious, delicate Virtual Boy console learned about the effects of gravitational acceleration and the consequences of seismic activity. (hey, this is a gaming forum, after all ).

The lights went out in my area from 3:30 AM to 10:30 AM approximately. Fortunately I was well prepared for such an outage. I have a car battery and a power inverter as an emergency backup. It provided lighting and TV for a solid 4 to 5 hours before needing to recharge. Electricity and Internet access pretty much come and go. High ping times and significant packet loss when accessing international websites are the norm as of now. Also my house developed an internal wiring fault due to the earthquake, one of the branch circuits randomly shorts out inside the wall conduit and it's really pissing me off. But again, a significant portion of Santiago still doesn't have electricity at all, let alone cities like Talca and Concepción.

I've contacted most of my family and close friends and fortunately they're all fine. I still don't know anything about my cousin who lives in Concepción and my friend from Talca, they must be completely disconnected and I hope they're OK. Getting a phone call trough is still an exercise in frustration and it has taken me several retries to make this post.

Once again, thank you guys for you concern and support.

EDIT: Just found a crack on one of the outside walls. There goes my "house intact!" record.

[satoshi_matrix]

Crazy. My thoughts are with you, your family and your friends.

[nensondubois]

Those surfers off the islands of Hawaii are well... idiots.

[JC]

Good to hear from you, 133! I'd been watching and reading, trying to find out about Santiago...

[Rogles]

Good to hear you're okay.

[manuel]

I'm glad that everything's ok.
That was a d**n big earthquake. The tsunamis even reached Japan a few hours ago.

[satoshi_matrix]

What's the situation as you understand it in Japan, manuel? Any precautions you've had to take personally?

[manuel]

The government issued tsunami warnings and advised people not to go near the coast to watch the incoming tsunamis.
Apart from that I didn't hear much, because we were on a trip and didn't watch TV the whole day.

[FamicomFreak]

That's great to hear you are fine 133mhz, when I first heard of the earthquake you were the first person that came to mind even though I have another friend that lives there lol. Well both of you are fine and I'm glad for that. Take care.

[Walky]

Well, after a year of absence I decided it might be a good time to rejoin this forum (too many things happened right after I joined, so I didn't have the time or will to participate in two retrogaming forums at once (the other one being www.retrogames.cl, which 133mhz knows well). I live in Viña del Mar (on the coast, 2 hours from Santiago), and it was quite a shake, but seems small as compared to what happened in the south (my family and friends are fine, BTW). The TV images of Concepción are REALLY a postapocalyptic sight, including neighbors teaming up to repel hordes of thieves, while the armed forced slowly begin to reach their region (at a time I remembered good'ol "Snake" Plissken; no, really). Damn, WTF is wrong with these people?!, they burned an apartment store, a supermarket and even vandalized the Firefighters' stations!; their supermarkets are practically empty mostly because of these same thiefs (which shamelessly robbed on camera). Talcahuano (Concepción's neighbor harbor-city) is completely destroyed; containers and ships ended up into the city. Valdalism and theft did the rest...


On the brighter side.... My Virtual Boy and Mac Classic flew about 5 feet and crashed on the floor, but somehow they both survived and work just fine (dunno about the Mac's HDD); same with my lcd, which even broke an oregon timber board when falling and STILL survived.
The rest of my collection is fine thanks to the fact that I moved to a new house a couple of months ago and 99% of it is still in boxes.
Luckily, my NES Test Station stayed in one piece; I would've freaked out if it didn't.

My CNC-controlling PC hit the concrete floor of my workshop pretty badly; I haven't tested it yet, but I'd be very surprised if the hard drive survived (at least the boards seem fine at first sight). Luckily, the rest of my CNC router seems fine (the thing's heavy as hell, It takes 2-3 people to lift it), I would castrate myself if it got damaged...

Anyway, I couldn't have cared less about my stuff in the very moment of the earthquake; I was just worried about my wife and cats.


Well, I'm back here to stay, so hello again!

[manuel]

Welcome back!
I'm glad to hear you were fine, too.

[son_ov_hades]

Walky! Glad to hear you're alright, I had heard from everyone I know in Chile besides you and was slightly worried. I hope you're doing well. Seems you got married, congratulations!

As for the mayhem in the south of Chile, its very sad. The extremes people will go to out of fear and desperation is quite scary. I know Chile will come out of this though.