Last Saturday, at 3.37am, Chile was struck by a terrible earthquake. At the epicenter, the quake registered 8.8 on the Richter Scale, one of the 5 strongest earthquakes at least since 1922. By noon, Nacho and I had been flooded with requests for photos and or video. I was hired by the AP to shoot video. By three, Nacho had been hired to provide content to the New York Times and we were going to go to Talca, the first major city which faced serious, widespread destruction from the quake.
What the difficulties were and what the difficulties weren’t in this assignment surprised me. Shooting was easy. People saw us with cameras and they wanted to talk – they wanted what they were experiencing to be seen. Visuals were everywhere. The greatest challenge, and something I never thought of before were the logistics. The earthquake had knocked out all of the power. Gas stations weren’t operating or full of people trying to get fuel for vehicles and generators. How would we able to get back and forth? By Nacho’s calculations, we had exactly enough gas to get there and back in ideal conditions – but, what about traffic, detours, any extra driving? How would we be able to edit on a shared Macbook with at most an hour and a half of battery power? How would we be able to get our images back to the home offices? 100km north of Talca, not even our phones were working. We couldn’t even speak with the offices, let alone send huge video files.
Firstly, gas. The morning after the quake, every gas station in Santiago had lines of at least 10 cars. Luckily, Nacho had filled his car the day before. Nevertheless, the whole way to Talca, Nacho was calculating how many more miles we had on the current tank of gas and when we would absolutely have to stop to insure that we could get home. Any open gas station had long lines, but we could never be sure that there would be another open further down the road.
As well, traffic was very, very heavy. There were points where the bulk of the traffic was turning around and returning home. Each time, we had to ask ourselves whether we thought it would be possible to continue through or whether this barricade would prevent us completely from continuing. We continued.
As we neared Talca, there was a major rerouting through a small town named San Rafael. The Carabineros’ office had suffered major damage. (Carabineros are essentially the police.) While the building still stood, much had fallen from it and the non-structural walls had collapsed. Outside, a group of men were talking. At Nacho’s urging, we stopped. We took video and photos of the place.
Nacho began to speak to the men. As it turned out, many of them were Carabineros, but their uniforms were buried beneath the rubble. We explained what we were doing, and they volunteered another individual in the group, a teacher at a local school, to accompany us with our work. It was 9pm at this time and the light was fading. We warned him that we would likely not sleep, but he was unfazed. “I didn’t sleep last night either,” he said, and he became an invaluable companion and friend for the rest of the time in Talca.
The first place he took us was a campamento of people from San Rafael. They’d moved their kitchen table into a field, and set up tents and a tarp. By this time, it was dark. I could shoot nothing with my video camera nor with the 7D. The only thing visible was the camp fire.
The second place he took us was the hospital. Here, there was light. We asked the doctor whether we could shoot in the patient area. His response was that under normal circumstances, there would be no chance. This, however, was a disaster, and people needed to see it. Thus, we were allowed in.
Finally, we went throughout the city, looking for damage. Again, I lacked sufficient light. The power was out throughout the town. The moon was full, and the eye was able to the see; the video sensors, alas, cannot. I shot some, using car lights or a small flash light, but still, it was frustrating. The jail had a working generator, and the lights were on there. Part of a major wall had fallen, and armed men were guarding it, trying to prevent the detainees from escaping as they did in Conception. (Roughly 216 are still missing from Conception’s jail.) It was there I got my most usable outside footage.
After this, Enrique mentioned that his friend had a generator. We were invited there to charge our batteries. It happened his friend also had a butcher shop, and a huge asado going. We were fed large pieces of meat until we could not eat a bit more, and then spent the evening in this courtyard, editing on their terrace, under a grape arbor as the aftershocks came every hour to half hour. (Aftershocks, another thing this Michigan girl knew nothing about. And, the only food we’d brought with us was a pack of cookies. If these people had not fed us, we would not have eaten.)
Nacho left with Enrique and his friend, and I was left to edit my hospital story at 3 am. They drove for a good hour and a half searching for a wireless signal. By chance, they found one, and Nacho managed to upload his photos from his iphone. They also filled up the gas tank. There are no lines at 3 am. I finished editing at 6.30 – two stories – the fastest I’ve ever done in my life.
At 7, we went with Enrique to refind the wireless signal but it had vanished. We went to the radio station. The director had a thumb internet drive. He agreed to let us use it for five minutes. It was the station’s only link to outside news. It took me 30 minutes to send an 8mb file and Nacho another 15 to resend 8 photos, as the iphone had compressed the images at 3 am, and the Times needed them bigger. Thus ends day 1. Day 2 is daylight shooting and finding out that the file I’d thought I’d sent had not gone.
