Haiti family survives second quake after taking refuge in Chile

THE Desarmes family left their native Haiti two weeks after the devastating January 12 earthquake, joining the eldest son in Chile for what seemed a refuge from the fear and chaos of Port-au-Prince.

Their sense of security lasted barely a month. It was shattered at 3.43am on Saturday when one of the most powerful quakes on record shook a swath of Chile.

All the Desarmes’ immediate family survived both quakes. But the family now sleeps in the garden of a home that the eldest son, Pierre Desarmes, found for them just south of the Chilean capital of Santiago. They fear yet another tremor will strike.

“I left my country and came here because of an earthquake,” Seraphin Philomene, a 21-year-old student and cousin of Desarmes, said.

“And here, the same thing. My God, I left my country and I didn’t die, but I’m going to die here.”

Pierre Desarmes, 34, managed to get his family out of Haiti thanks to personal contacts at the Chilean Embassy in Port-au-Prince and the Chilean armed forces. Nine members of his family – his parents, two brothers and their families, and three cousins – arrived in Santiago on a Chilean air force plane on January 23.

Meanwhile, Chile will need international loans and three or four years to rebuild after a massive earthquake killed more than 800 people and ravaged its infrastructure, President Michelle Bachelet said.

The 8.8-magnitude quake on Saturday destroyed or seriously damaged hundreds of thousands of homes, broke bridges and highways, cracked modern buildings in the capital’s suburbs, shattered vats at Chile’s famous vineyards and briefly shut down some of the world’s richest copper mines.

“We will undoubtedly need to turn to international lenders,” Bachelet said. “We are going to have to ask for credit and hope that via the World Bank or other mechanisms we can count on sufficient funds.”

Bachelet’s government initially said it would be able to cope with reconstruction costs out of its budget. But it misjudged the scale of the damage, which according to one estimate could reach $30 billion, or about 15% of the South American country’s gross domestic product.

Terrified by dozens of powerful aftershocks, survivors in some of the worst-hit towns are living in makeshift shelters and abandoned cars on hillsides as rescue workers search the rubble for survivors and troops patrol to quell looting.