Toppled building in Concepcion
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.
The Bridge Team has spent the last two days in the epicentral region. What a contrast to skirting around the edge of strong shaking on the Monday! We spent most of Tuesday traveling to the now remote town of Tubul. Remote “now” because a landslide and bridge collapse has cut off the town except for a small gravel road over a mountain. It seemed like everyone in the town was living in tents because either their homes were destroyed or from fear of aftershocks. Food and water was being brought in by truck and handed out to the people. What struck me was the number of Chilean flags flying all over, in the countryside and tent cities,large and small, in order to show support for each other. It reminded me of the American flags you see after our own disasters.
Our job on Tuesday was to document the bridge failure in Tubul. The 500-foot long bridge had totally collapsed, almost like a stack of
The ground near the epicenter of the quake, liquified.
dominoes. The collapse was a result of strong shaking from the earthquake. We saw signs of a tsunami, including a boat hung up on top of a piling, but after talking with the locals, it was clear that the bridge collapsed during the earthquake. The tsunami coming 20 to 30 minutes later just made things worse. That 20 to 30 minutes is the same warning we’ll have on the Oregon Coast after the Cascadia Earthquake.
We made it to Concepcion Tuesday night, and stayed in a small motel with intermittent water and electricity. Concepcion is the second largest city in Chile and is considered the epicenter for strong shaking. Many tall concrete buildings were damaged, as well as scores of masonry structures. Piles of brick were seen everywhere, and many streets were blocked off from rubble or from buildings threatening to collapse into the street. On Wednesday, it was common to see people going to fire hydrants and water trucks with bottles to fill. We saw one line of over 300 people waiting for some type of relief. In Concepcion, our job was to document damage to 4 bridges crossing the 1.5 mile wide Bio Bio River. Both highway bridges were damaged (one closed and one down to a single lane temporary bridge), resulting in severe traffic. We walked most of the day, back and forth across the bridges. It appeared that liquefaction and lateral spreading played a role in each case, along with strong shaking.
A boat rests on a piling near the epicenter of Chile's earthquake.
We made it to Lenares tonight. While we collected important, perishable data to improve earthquake safety for everyone, I am glad to be out of the epicentral region. The people are going through a tough time. Many are without food and water. Many are homeless. And the stress level is constantly high. We felt 3 strong aftershocks while there. For one aftershock, we were in a large crowd in a mall, and everyone just got quiet. Many just quietly got up a left. Tomorrow night, we are back in Santiago. More then.
