On the night of April 1, 2014, at 8:46pm, Columban Fr Michael Howe was singing the final hymn with the congregation at the usual Tuesday night Mass in the church of Our Lady of Mt Carmel. Fr Michael Howe is the parish priest of the Columban parish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Alto Hospicio, a dormitory urban area for the busy port city of Iquique. It is located on the mountain range, 650 metres high above Iquique, in northern Chile. The Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church belongs to this parish.
All of a sudden, a strong earthquake struck off the coast, just north of the city of Iquique. This earthquake had a magnitude of 8.2 on the Richter scale and was also felt in the neighbouring countries of Peru and Bolivia. Nineteen minutes later, at 9:05pm, a 2.11 metre tsunami hit the coast at Iquique.
The earthquake and tsunami left seven people dead, 200 hospitalized and 2500 homes and businesses destroyed. A large number of powerful aftershocks continued after the initial earthquake including one measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale two days later on April 3. Soon after the earthquake and tsunami, Columban Fr Michael Howe sent us the following report.
At the regular Tuesday night Mass, on April 1st at 8:46pm, while we were singing the final hymn in the church of Our Lady of Mt Carmel, a very strong earthquake measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, struck.
All the lights in the church immediately went out. Amidst the crashing of glass, intense noise and the shaking of the ground and building, we managed to make our way to the door of the church, thanks to the glow of the candles that were still lit on the altar and had not yet fallen.
When the intense shaking and thundering noise of the earthquake ceased, my first thought was to thank God for being alive and that no-one from the congregation had been killed or injured. My thoughts then turned to the possibility of a tsunami for the city of Iquique, which is located along the coast, way down the mountain from us.
After walking home with a terrified family who had been with me at Mass, I then made it back to my own home several blocks away, where I met my companion, Fr Albinus Lee, a Korean Priest Associate. Luckily little damage had been done to our presbytery.
Fr Albinus and I then went to see our neighbours. After an earthquake, everyone goes out onto the street, for fear of aftershocks and falling debris. We found all of our neighbours out on the street listening to car radios for news of the earthquake. They were all worried about family members who would have been coming home from work in Iquique, 15kms away down the mountain.
Fr Albinus and myself then went to the church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, our parish church. We found much of the ceiling had been damaged. We then decided that there was nothing much more we could do that night, so went back home and to our neighbours who would spend the night camping out on the street.
The next morning we heard that seven people had died, mainly due to heart attacks and falling debris.
Many fishing boats had been damaged by the tsunami. A city council truck was going around distributing drinking water to residents. Later that day electricity returned. As some new apartments had been damaged in Iquique, several families with mattresses were allowed to move into a large meeting room of one of our parish chapels, St Teresa of the Andes.
Later that morning the new bishop of the Diocese of Iquique, Bishop Vera, telephoned us to find out how we and our parishioners were after the earthquake. He told us that he had to evacuate his home due to the imminent danger of a tsunami, but had been allowed to return around 4:00am after the alert had been lifted. Bishop Vera had been one of the tens of thousands of people from coastal areas of Iquique that had to evacuate to higher ground during the night after the earthquake.
It was a big relief when we discovered that no one died on the road up the mountain from Iquique to Alto Hospicio as many could have died due to land and rock slides onto the road during the earthquake. One of the rather funny things that happened as a result of the earthquake was that more than 300 women prisoners escaped from the Iquique Women's Prison during the earthquake. Most were soon caught or handed themselves in. So their holiday was short.
Unfortunately all the damage to parish property will hold us up considerably in our parish pastoral plan. Often things that we have all worked out and are well ordered, just don't happen. Our new bishop's motto is, "Our help is in the name of the Lord." The earthquake, tsunami and our disrupted parish plans remind us that it is to the Lord that we must always turn for help and in whose name comes our help and not from our efforts alone. 
Columban Fr Michael Howe has been a missionary in Chile since 1978. He has been parish priest of Sacred Heart of Jesus parish, Alto Hospicio, since 2007.
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LISTEN TO: Powerful earthquake in northern Chile (Duration: 6:09mins, MP3, 2.81MB) |