Shock waves from the 8.8-magnitude earthquake that rocked Chile early Saturday rippled through Denver as concerned loved ones sought information about family members in the South American country.
“The first thing I thought of is my family,” said Ercilia Parker-Marquez, a Denver resident and native of Chile. She was especially concerned for her 77-year-old sister, who lives in a Santiago apartment building on about the 12th floor.
“They say it was terrible inside the house,” Parker-Marquez said, but her four sisters and one brother are all safe.
Parker-Marquez survived 1960’s magnitude-9.5 earthquake in Chile. She was 17 years old at the time. Her father grabbed her and yanked her into the house to avoid toppling chimneys.
The 1960 quake’s epicenter was near Valdivia, Chile, and caused large tsunamis, Parker-Marquez said.
“I remember after the tsunami, many, many little villages disappeared,” she said.
Lloyd Yonemura grew up in Hawaii and now works as an admissions counselor for Hawaiian applicants to the University of Northern Colorado. He was 9 years old in 1960 and remembers the tsunami caused by that Chilean quake. The waves killed more than 30 people.
“I remember a lot of waves coming in,” Yonemura said. “My dad took us out to watch.”
At the time, radio coverage was poor and he saw no local television news. The community relied on word of mouth and observation to judge the strength of the tsunami.
On Saturday morning, he was in his mother’s home in Wailuku, Hawaii, waiting for any predicted tsunamis from the earthquake to arrive.
Lists of closures and cancellations scrolled across local television channels. Real-time images of different locations flashed on the screen.
“We had ample warning, and people pretty much knew what to do,” Yonemura said.
Soledad Bowers, living in Centennial but Chilean-born, reached family members by phone in Santiago early Saturday. They reported computers and televisions knocked to the floor and the family swimming pool emptied of 60 percent of its water by the quake, Bowers said.
Awakened by the temblor, Bowers’ family ran to the front of the house.
“Outside it was like being drunk. You couldn’t stand up well because of the shaking, and it was long, like 90 seconds.”
Geoff Biddulph of Berthoud said he got word about the earthquake after finding an e-mail message from his father, Romney Biddulph, who has lived in Santiago for the past two years with his wife, Betty.
Goeff said his father told him they were doing well despite being “literally knocked out of bed” when the earthquake rocked the capital.
Evergreen resident Leslie Armstrong travels to Hawaii each year. Saturday, Armstrong said from Kauai that she was enjoying “an absolute gorgeous day with cloudless skies,” but not from a sandy beach. She was confined to the eighth floor of a Marriott hotel on Hawaii’s northernmost island.
Armstrong said she wasn’t bothered by the vacation interruption.
“It seems like a fairly routine process here, and it’s going smoothly.”
