Following are pictures one week after the earth quake of 27 Feb 2010.   The first thing that is different is that each plane arriving at the SCL airport waits outside some new tent buildings while the baggage is unloaded from that plane onto the tarmac.  Then the passengers disembark and after picking up their bag proceed to immigration and customs inside the tent.  The immigration people are set up with lap tops and plenty of people and the baggage scanners have been relocated along with the sniffing dogs to help find that guy bringing oranges into the country. 

Check in for domestic flights is in another tent.   Rental car offices...... Ummmm  keep asking and eventually you will find them way on the east side over the incoming access road, way over beyond the right side of this picture.  It took us 45 minutes.

The terminal appeared from our vantage point not to have sustained much damage but there must be a mess inside.     Driving south from Santiago to Los Angeles was really quite easy.  In the metro Santiago area there are no detours required coming from the airport to route 5 South.   At Buin there is a detour and one passes near an overpass where the approach embankments have almost fully caved away.  It was obvious that the fill on these embankments was round rock which do not stand up well.  Continuing on down south there were many places where the roadway dipped or was partially collapsed on the side.  It seemed that almost all of this collapsed sections were filled areas and almost every culvert caused a slight dip.

The south bound bridge over the Rio Claro is collapsed.  This was the old Rt 5 bride and was a nice stone bridge.  The new one is a concrete arch span which held up.

Further down south of Talca there were a few grain storage towers that collapsed and one food distribution ware house was burned.

Several over passes were damaged and we had to drive around with a single lane on the North bound side or on a side road.  Many of the walking bridges were roped off as insecure. 

At the Hotel La Turbina things are quite normal.  The folks there said they were lucky because they have a water source and a generator.  But running the generator for 72 hours was unexpected and due to the lack (or perceived lack) of fuel, a black market quickly opened up for diesel.  Because the hotel had power and water, the villagers of Coigue came and could get drinking water and plug in to charge their cell phones.   The people at the hotel described the damages in Nacimiento as less than that in Los Angeles and certainly less than in Concepcion. 

Tuesday we will go into the mill.  Don't expect pictures of that here.

Later update....................

here are some pictures from Concepcion taken about 40 days after the quake:

The old bridge which has been closed for a while lost several sections. 

One big commercial building in the center of town suffered pretty badly.

This building tipped over due to excavation adjacent to it

This boat is over 1km from the ocean but luckily it is upright and near a road so it can be transported back to the water.  Others were not as fortunate.

As you can see there are many who suffered and lost a lot in this disaster.  One of the key providers of relief is Un Techo Para Chile and you can donate on their web page:  http://www.untechoparachile.cl