Last month, Ridgefield travel agent and tour guide Carol Pinnell had a choice to make, with her clients still reveling in the natural beauty of their South American travels and the sites of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires still fresh in their minds.
"It was a question of whether to go to Concepcion and southern Chile, to show them places I knew, or to take the bus over the spectacular Andean pass to Mendoza, Argentina," said Pinnell, owner of Group Journeys LLC in downtown Ridgefield, where she works to facilitate her customers' travel dreams, often accompanying them on their journey.
She chose Mendoza, Argentina, arriving on Feb. 26, the day before a powerful earthquake rocked the hotel where Pinnell and her tour group had turned in for the night, about 400 miles from the quake's epicenter near Concepcion.
"I napped right through most of it, but when I woke up the water was still sloshing out of the hotel's pool," said Craig Chisholm, a retired lawyer who was also on the trip.
The approximately four-minute-long quake was so massive that Concepcion literally moved 10 feet west and, according to NASA, days will now be 1.26 microseconds shorter because the temblor caused a slight shift in the Earth's axis.
Nearly 500 people were killed, mostly in areas near the quake's epicenter and in small fishing villages wiped-away by the resulting tsunami, with thousands injured across the country.
Pinnell and her 12 fellow travelers made it through their ordeal unscathed. However, she said the experience was harrowing for everyone.
A travel agent for 37 years, Pinnell is used to adventure. An owner of a Portland travel agency employing around 40 people until 2001, Pinnell later decided to sell her business and move to Ridgefield, eventually opening a smaller travel business in an abandoned church on Fourth Avenue.
Though the power was out and most communications were down, Pinnell's group managed to travel more than 200 miles towards Chile's capital, Santiago, to catch a return flight to the U.S. However, Santiago's airport had been shut down due to its proximity to the quake, temporarily stranding Pinnell and her fellow travelers.
Santiago was shaken, literally, but the town suffered no casualties, thanks in large part to the city's strong infrastructure and resilient people, according to Pinnell.
"In white chalk all around the town, Chilean rescue workers had written ‘Chile ayuda Chile,' or ‘Chile helps Chile.' I think it's a huge mistake to think these people are helpless," she said.
Amazingly, though all the computer systems were still down, the airport reopened March 5, checking in the passengers with pen-and-paper manifests, Chisholm said.
"Honestly, it was hard to come home from such a beautiful place." he said.
Pinnell, who had first visited Chile in 1969 after hitchhiking there from Berkley in a trip that inspired her to pursue a lifetime as a travel agent, said that parts of the long nation, with nearly 4,000 miles of coastline, were akin to the Washington and Oregon coast in its geography and climate.
According to Doug Gibbons, a researcher with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network in Seattle, the similarities between our region and the South American nation extended well below the surface.
"In both areas, the oceanic plate is being subducted under the coastal one, creating similar seismic potential," Gibbons said.
Gibbons likened the force of two plates pushing against each other to a person pressing the edge of their hands together as hard as they can. Eventually one will slip under the other, he said, potentially releasing a lot of energy.
For instance, geologists say the force of the recent Chilean earthquake was equivalent to five billion tons of TNT exploding – powerful enough to shake the entire Andes region, including Pinnell and her tour group.
Pinnell said her fellow travelers made a conscious decision not to be frightened, since they realized it was the worst thing they could have done in a stressful situation.
Rather the "seasoned" group stuck together, according to Chisholm.
"The hardest part was being without Internet service or cell phones," he said.
