Chile Earth­quake — Update 2
The fol­low­ing is a sum­ma­ry of the infor­ma­tion received from Reinal­do Lean­dro Pres­i­dent of IARU Region 2 and Jorge Sier­ra, LU1AS who is the Region 2 Area co-ordi­na­tor cov­er­ing Chile.
Reinal­do talked by phone with Doc­tor Galdino Beso­mi CE3PG Radio Club de Chile (RCCH) president.
After the earth­quake struck, an Emer­gency Net was acti­vat­ed across the whole coun­try, first on VHF and then in HF. All the board of the Chile Nation­al Soci­ety and local club mem­bers are active­ly work­ing in close coor­di­na­tion with civ­il and mil­i­tary authorities.
Three days after the earth­quake the request for news about peo­ple in the affect­ed coun­try­side areas is one the main activ­i­ty occu­py­ing the radio amateurs.
Jorge con­firms that there are sev­er­al fre­quen­cies in 40 meters receiv­ing traf­fic to try and locate peo­ple from sta­tions in Chile and Argentina.
They most activ­i­ty is on 7050, 7060, 7088, 7095 and oth­ers and sta­tions are mon­i­tor­ing these frequencies.
Almost all the traf­fic heard is relat­ed to locat­ing peo­ple, but it is not easy to find them because the sit­u­a­tion in the small towns near San­ti­a­go is very dif­fi­cult, they don‘t have elec­tric­i­ty, tele­phone lines or cell phones; emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions sta­tions are run­ning on batteries.
As you may have seen on news broad­casts, the air­port at San­ti­a­go is again oper­a­tive but with some restric­tions. The gov­ern­ment asked oth­er coun­tries in the region not to send help until they could review the sit­u­a­tion and ask for their exact needs.
— Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, Chair­man, IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee.