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Oregon State professor and head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering Scott Ashford will be in Chile for the next week, as a part of a 30-member scientific team that will be studying the effects of the recent earthquake. Ashford will be reporting on his experiences in the Powered by Orange blog.

I arrived on the red-eye from Dallas this morning, and we had a team meeting at 2pm in Santiago for the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Chile Earthquake Reconnaissance Team. We had over 40 people participate for the 3 hour meeting: half EERI Team members and half local Chilean faculty and students. What an opportunity for these students! I have been assigned to the 4-person Bridge Team. We are heading out at 6am tomorrow to travel 700 km through the epicentral region to Temuco, Chile,  tomorrow. We plan to then work our way back to the epicenter into Concepcion, Chile, on Tuesday, and make it to Curico, Chile, on  Wednesday, returning to Santiago, Chile, on Thursday.  This trip would not be possible without the help of Rodrigo Oviedo, a Masters student at the Catholic University in Chile.  He will travel with us the entire way!

We spent the afternoon planning our route, and then shopping for supplies (food, water , etc) so that we are self-sufficient and not taking supplies away from those Chileans directly affected by the earthquake.

So far, my impressions are that Santiago was relatively unaffected by the earthquake, on the surface. It was certainly felt; lasting as long at 2 and ∏ minutes by some accounts! And you see isolated damage around town. Certain areas may have amplified the ground motions  because of soil conditions. We will look into this. There also may be hidden damage in structures that will come out over time. This will be part of our investigation.

We talked with one student from Catholic University that was surfing during the earthquake, and heard the tsunami warning siren. He had 30 minutes to escape to high ground, but saw his car washed away from the tsunami! This is essentially the time we will have for warning in Seaside from the Cascadia Earthquake!

I believe we will have internet tomorrow in Temuco. Until then!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 9:48 am and is filed under chile, engineering, healthy people. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.