Pamela Bradford’s wake-up call at her Denver home this morning was an annoying telephone that wouldn’t stop ringing, and when she answered it she wasn’t prepared for the news.
“My father said there was a powerful earthquake in Chile and it was quite shocking,” Bradford said.
Born and raised in Arica, Chile, a city north of Santiago, Bradford is accustomed to the earth shaking. As a child, she had participated in earthquake drills at school.
Bradford is a martial arts instructor. She moved to Colorado in 1999 with most of her family, but her brother, Adolfo Romero Valenzuela, an artist, lives in Santiago.
By noon today, Bradford received an email message from her aunts telling her that they got word he was OK, but was without water and electricity.
“He’s always out and likes to go downtown. It’s summer there now and I think if this had happened at 1 p.m. it would have been more a disaster.”
Geoff Biddulph of Berthoud he got word about the earthquake after finding an email message from his father, Romney Biddulph, who has lived with his wife, Betty for the past two years in Santiago.
Goeff said his father told him they were doing well despite being “literally knocked out of bed” when the magnitude 8.8 earthquake rocked the capitol.
The Biddulphs are members of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and help people at a temple in Santiago, their son said.
Biddulph, who frequently conducts business in Chile, said he’s not too worried about his parents’ well-being.
“It’s a very advanced country compared to the rest of Latin America,” he said. “They have building codes in place and are much more prepared for disasters.”
Evergreen resident Leslie Armstrong travels to Hawaii each year. Today, Armstrong said she was enjoying “an absolute gorgeous day with cloudless skies,” but it wasn’t on a sandy beach — it was while being confined to the 8th floor of a Marriott hotel on Hawaii’s northernmost island of Kauai.
As an expected tsunami approached, hotel guests had been moved to the upper floors for their safety and told to stay put.
Armstrong said her phone began ringing at 4 a.m. with calls from friends and family in Texas and Colorado who urged her to turn the TV on.
By 6 a.m. sirens went off and were followed by Civil Defense sirens that kept going off every half hour.
Armstrong said she wasn’t bothered by the vacation interruption.
“It seems like a fairly routine process here and it’s going smoothly,” Armstrong said.
