Students unharmed by Chilean earthquake

All Middlebury students studying abroad in Chile are accounted for and doing well after the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the region on Feb. 27.

Saturday’s quake hit Chile at 3:28 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. By 4 a.m., the Schools Abroad program had alerted Dean of International Programs Jeff Cason.

“I don’t think you can inform Middlebury much faster than that,” said Michael Geisler, vice president for Language Schools, Schools Abroad and Graduate Programs.

Cason quickly contacted all the affected students and e-mailed their parents. Meanwhile, Geisler suggested that an update be placed on the Middlebury Web site.

All the students were attending orientation in Santiago, which made it easy to track them after the earthquake occurred. According to Associate Professor and Director of the School in Latin America Jeff Stevenson, orientation took place in a modern building that suffered no structural damage. StillBut, students at orientation, including Evan Doyle ’11, described the day as very scary.

“There were crashing noises outside the room, alarms going off,” wrote Doyle in an e-mail.

“It felt like being inside a washing machine, with absolutely no control over what was occurring around me. After the shaking stopped, I tried to open our door, but the frame had shifted slightly, making it more difficult to open, so a man in the hallway pushed it in from outside. All the Middlebury students congregated in the hallways and our directors took us down to the lobby where it was safer. An hour and a half later, we returned to our rooms to sleep, but were awakened by the frequent tremors and aftershocks.”

After the earthquake, the program coordinators began assessing the homes of homestay families to ensure these homes had no structural damage and could receive students following orientation, according to Stevenson.

The students remained in a hotel in Santiago for an extra day while the houses were examined, partly due to the fact that buses were not running. The students studying in Santiago, Viña del Mar, Valparaíso and La Serena were allowed to go to their homestays on Monday, and the students studying in Valdivia went on Tuesday.

The earthquake did prompt two students — who had planned to study in Concepción, near the epicenter of the quake — to study in La Serena instead.

Two students, Tom Crocker ’11.5 and Melissa Segil ’11.5, were the last to be accounted for following the disaster. Crocker and Segil, both studying abroad in Argentina, were traveling in Valparaíso when the quake hit. By 11:34 a.m. on Sunday, the Schools Abroad program made contact with the two students and verified their safety.

“It was undoubtedly the most terrifying experience of my life,” wrote Segil in an e-mail.

“I was in Valparaíso, quite a ways north of the epicenter, but woke up around 3:30 a.m. when the hostel I was staying at started to shake — hard. The shaking lasted about three minutes and during that time the old colonial-style house, over 100 years old, was shaking a lot. Plaster was falling off the ceiling and a few floorboards got pretty warped.”

Segil said the hostel owners were very kind and reassuring in the wake of the incident, insisting that the guests not try to go outside.

“Valparaíso is built all over the hills near the beach and I had no doubt that our building was going to collapse, as was everything surrounding it, and it would be a giant mess of collapsed buildings with lots of people trapped inside,” wrote Segil.

“But somehow, most all buildings were still standing in the morning, but there were plenty of broken windows, and lots of balconies and ironwork had fallen off the sides of buildings. We lost electricity for most of the morning but it was back later that same day.”

Crocker also described the situation in an e-mail sent to friends and family after the quake.

"As Mel and I ran around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to get outside we realized it wasn’t possible/was too dangerous to try to run through the hostel that felt like it was falling apart,” wrote Crocker. “So we hunkered down under our door frame and endured the violent shaking for what felt like an eternity.”

In the e-mail, Crocker also described a reconnaissance mission after they left the hostel.

“We took a microbus to Vina del Mar to check out the beach over there this afternoon and were amazed by how much it felt like a ghost town,” wrote Crocker.

“Huge high rises everywhere — some with curtains blowing out broken windows - but practically no one walking around. We think a lot of the people fled in their cars after the initial quake this morning.”

They had to leave the beach soon after due to a tsunami warning.

Segil also said she had nothing but respect for the Chilean people and their quick response to the quake. Segil and Crocker are safely in Argentina now, and plan to start classes in Buenos Aires in a week.

Updates about the Schools Abroad response to the earthquake may be found on the Chile Schools Abroad Web site (http://www.middlebury.edu/sa/latin_america/chile).