A strong earthquake 7.5 in the sea of the southern end of Chile caused yesterday that the authorities activated by the tsunami alert and evacuation of coastal areas that are not populated in this region close to Antarctica.
The earthquake was recorded almost at 10 am at sea, 218 km south of the town of Puerto Williams (about 2,500 kilometers south of Santiago), already 10 kilometers deep, according to the National Seismological Center, under the University of Chile.
Several villages had to be evacuated for a few hours preventively from the coast of the Magallanes region, in Chile, by this earthquake of magnitude 7.5 according to the Chilean authorities (7.4 according to the United States Geological Service, USGS). Also a hundred inhabitants of Puerto Almanza, in the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, were evacuated.
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“I did not give much importance until the alarms sounded. A little chaos formed because it is not normal for them to feel tremled here,” Shirley Gallego, 41 years old, operated on a fishing plant in the town of Porvenir, separated by the Magellan Strait of Punta Arenas, the regional capital.
In Ushuaia, the southernmost city in Argentina, there was also fear: “I was sleeping at that time and I began to feel that the bed moved a lot. It lasted a considerable time, let’s say a few minutes, and there I was scared,” said Sofía Ramonet.
Three Argentine athletes who made a crossing in Kayak at Cabo de Hornos, one of the southernmost points in America, had to return for the activated Tsunami alert. Diego Linares, Walter Cayo and Javier Siede did not perceive the earthquake and the waters remained meek, so they continued to paddle and reached the goal. “We were minutes from Cabo de Hornos, when the boys who were on the support ship felt the tremor in the helmet and at the moment they began to receive alerts” with the order to evacuate, Linares said to the AFP.
The authorities raised the Tsunami alert two hours later. The decision was made after the Chilean Military Base Arturo Prat, in the Antarctic Peninsula, was registered “a six centimeter variation of the sea level,” said Alicia Cebrián, National Director of the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (Senapred).
Return to activity. “Everyone returns and returns to their activities. All sectors must be working in a normal way, with the exception of the economic activities of the coast,” said Juan Carlos Andrade, director in Magellan of the Chilean state agency of disasters.
The same happened in Argentina. “The alert level fell and that is why we bring tranquility to the population,” said the Secretary of Civil Protection in the province of Tierra del Fuego, Pedro Franco, cited in the Government’s account in X.
Chile is one of the countries with the most earthquakes in the world, where three plates converge.
