Subject: [IGSMAIL-6096]: TIGO earthquake report 10-03-06
From: "Behrend, Dirk (GSFC-698.0)[NVI INC]" <[email-masked]>
To: "'IVS Mail'" <[email-masked]>, IGSmail <[email-masked]>, "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>, "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2010 23:30:52 -0600

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IGS Electronic Mail      06 Mar 21:30:57 PST 2010      Message Number 6096
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Author: Hayo Hase

Dear colleagues,

The Head of the Geodetic Observatory TIGO, Dr. Hayo Hase, asked
me to pass on his eyewitness report about the situation at TIGO
following the megaquake. Please find below his account that I
reformatted from PDF to ASCII to enable distribution.

Best regards,
Dirk Behrend

San Pedro de la Paz, 06.03.10

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

this is my first message to all of you at all continents after the
earthquake with magnitude 8.8 and a duration of about 2 minutes 30
seconds (which is unusually long!). First of all, I would like to
thank you for your concern regarding the well-being of my family
members and colleagues of the TIGO crew. With most of our staff I
have already been in contact or got second hand information that
they survived and are well.

Today, one week after the event, it is the first day I got access
to the internet, so that I can broadcast this message to you. The
situation in Concepcisn as of today is the following: The 7th and
8th Region of Chile are under curfew. Hence we can leave our houses
only between 12:00 and 18:00 local time. During these afternoon
hours I could visit TIGO twice for about 4 hours. I needed to go
by bicycle as the only track over a damaged bridge crossing Rio
Bmo Bmo is jammed by cars waiting to cross the bridge up to 3 hours.
With my bike I make it in 20 minutes. (Before we had 4 tracks each
direction 24h.) Roads and cycle ways are heavily affected by cracks
and steps of up to 50cm, which requires careful riding.

A first inspection of the TIGO-instruments showed, that our
containers must have jumped around. Before the quake they were well
aligned, they are not any more. The radiotelescope was held by its
brakes. Visual inspection did not show any damage. So far I had no
time to do a thorough test on the mechanics. I would like to be up
with TIGO-VLBI as soon as possible, but there is still no
electricity and internet at TIGO and our generator power is being
used to maintain clocks and GPS only. We have to economize our fuel
stock. Concerning TIGO-SLR we noted that the optical table was hit
by the container (remember that the table stood on its own fundaments,
while the container moved over the ground). The absolute gravity
meter fell down. The superconducting gravity meter maintained its
temperature. The TIGO-GPS stations CONT and CONZ recorded 1s samples
GPS/Glonass data. But without electricity the servers and the network
of Universidad de Concepcisn are still down.

The University of Concepcisn suffered several losses and damages at
their buildings. The Chemistry Faculty burnt and exploded twice during
the earthquake night. Several buildings are in bad shape and need to
be demolished and rebuilt. You can imagine, what this means for the
scientists and the education of students. We have heard about the
financial problems of the University regarding TIGO before the
earthquake. What will be the situation now?

We are still hit by aftershock events. Within the first five days we
counted more than 200 events of which at least 12 ranged in magnitudes
between 6 and 7 (Richter scale). This indicates, that we are still not
back to normal. People still tend to sleep in cars or outside. The
days after the strong event on February 27 had been again very critical
for all of us, when vandalism spread over the town. All shops, banks,
pharmacies, fuel stations and even medical stations were plundered and
some of them were burnt after. That means that any kind of
infrastructure, which is heavily needed to get back to normal life, is
missing at the moment. Normal citizens needed to organize themselves
building barricades and defending their block/neighbourhood. I myself
did guard service night shifts with a wooden stick. Situation changed
when the government sent about 8.000 soldiers to the 8th Region with
its capital Concepcisn. Some plunderers were killed by armed
authorities. The 7th and 8th Region are declared as disaster area
for 30 days (basically the entire March). Normally, after the
vacation period (which ended on Feb 28th), schools and universities
had been supposed to begin their activities on March 1st. This has
now been postponed by about one month. Chile is lacking civil engineers
who are needed to do many inspections before many buildings can be
entered again. Thanks to the construction standards most of the
buildings withstood the seismic movements without collapsing, but now
they have to be demolished and rebuild completely. They fulfilled their
purpose.

Downtown department houses are still subject to collapse by strong
aftershock events. Therefore some streets are partly closed, because
of this danger. Although electricity and water supply is coming back
slowly, it sometimes interrupts again. My only information source
during the last 7 days was the local Radio Bmo Bmo which even guided
the authorities, when people reported what they witnessed. All of you
had been probably better informed about our situation in the daily news,
than ourselves caught with no electricity in silence. Little by little
I am realizing the magnitude of the disaster. The tsunami generated
by the major earthquake eliminated the village of Dichato where we
operated our GPS-receiver of the TIGO-network. I got the information
that the pillar resisted, but have no information about the equipment
itself. Without permit and fuel I cannot go there myself. In the
harbour town of Talcahuano containers were swept by the tsunami wave
into houses, fishermen's ships are blocking the streets now. A 175m
long vessel (25.000t) in the dock for repair is now resting on the
quay. I heard that the wave reached 13m height. There are more disaster
notes to come, as soon as communication are getting better.

Yesterday, first food packages could be sold under military control
in small portions. The distribution is basically done during night
hours, when nobody is allowed to be outside the houses. These are
signs of recuperation of normality. Nevertheless, it will take years
to recover from this earthquake (which is still not over due to the
aftershocks), I would like to close my first message to the outside
world with the following request:

When we decided on where to operate TIGO, we had considered the
subduction zone of Chile as a location where we can measure geophysical
phenomena which we do not observe easily at our mother observatory
in Wettzell, Germany. In a German-Chilean effort we made everything
possible to collect as much data as possible for more than 8 years.
Currently German and Chilean project partners are having problems
in financing TIGO. I am confident, that the so far detected damages of
the instrumentation can be repaired.

Please be aware, that the scientific community has a unique opportunity
to get a complete picture of pre- and post-megathrust-event data, if
the operation of TIGO can be financially assured for at least the
next 8 years. The uniqueness of the scientific data of TIGO is its
tie to the global context thanks to the international services.

During the last days my colleagues and me have been facing death
and destruction. The consequences from the disaster will accompany
us during the months to come concerning our living and labour
conditions. But we will bear them. Similar megathrust-events will
repeat at other locations in the world in future times. If you want
to help us, please help us to keep TIGO operational for the years
to come. I am well aware of the fact that we need many more years
to do research for earthquake prediction. But even if we should
need another 100 years, at least our generation will have been done
the right thing by taking the first steps. Shutting the observatory off
right now would mean shutting it off just in the moment when humanity
could get the most benefit out of it. This is certainly not the time
to give up. It is the time continue and get the most out of it! Please
help us doing this.

Dr. Hayo Hase, BKG

Head of the Geodetic Observatory TIGO, Concepcisn

(Please distribute this report, to whom it may concern!)