“FELT THE BED MOVING”
Sofia Ramonet told AFP was asleep when she “felt the bed moving a lot” in her third-floor apartment in Ushuaia.
“I looked up at the ceiling where I have a hanging lamp, and it was moving from one side to the other. It lasted a considerable amount of time, a few minutes.”
When she looked out the window, she saw “a lot of people outside their homes” who were “scared because they didn’t know what was happening or what to do.”
There was no evacuation order for Ushuaia.
But residents of Puerto Almanza, a village 75 kilometres to the east on the Beagle Channel, which separates the main island in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago from smaller islands and which could act as a funnel for a wave surge, were ordered to move to higher ground.
All nautical activities in the Beagle Channel were suspended, Tierra del Fuego’s secretary for civil protection told AFP.
The quake was felt 160 miles as the crow flies north of Ushuaia in the Chilean town of Porvenir on the Strait of Magellan.
“I didn’t give it much thought until the alarms sounded. It caused a bit of chaos because it’s not normal to feel tremors here,” Shirley Gallego, a 41-year-old fishing plant operator, told AFP.
