Mistakenly Announced Tsunami Warning, Chilean Government Caused Public To Panic

Kota Santiago, Chile (Unsplash / Caio Sila)

JAKARTA - The Chilean authorities expressed their regret after making a fatal mistake after causing their citizens to panic absurdly when they received a tsunami warning that turned out to be false. This sent people from the coast after the earthquake in Antarctica.

Quoting CNN, Monday, January 25, 2021, on Saturday January 23 at 8:36 p.m., the Chilean Interior Ministry issued a warning of a 7.1 magnitude earthquake 216 kilometers northeast of Chile's O'Higgins scientific base on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Through its official Twitter account, the Chilean Ministry of Interior called for people in the coastal area of Antarctica to be evacuated due to the risk of a tsunami.

However, it turned out that the information transmitted via the cellular network was wrong. Even though residents already feel urged to leave the coastal area.

"We want to give the residents peace of mind, telling them that there is no need to evacuate the entire national territory, only the Antarctic base," Miguel Ortiz of the National Emergency Office (ONEMI) told a news conference.

Miguel said his agency regretted the inconvenience which he described as a technical error. The tsunami warning for Antarctica was later annulled.

Panic rush

The clarification was too late to control the panic. People in coastal cities including La Serena, to the north of Santiago, and Valparaiso, have sometimes fled their homes after receiving the warning. They only returned after reports that it was a false warning.

As Chileans reacted to the warning, a second earthquake measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale struck the Chile-Argentina border region according to the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences. The earthquake was at a depth of 133 km sea and occurred 30 km east of Santiago. No damage was reported from the two earthquakes.

Chile's National Geological and Mining Service or Sernageomin said that after the first earthquake, 80 people were evacuated from Chile's main base in Antarctica, Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva Base on the Fildes Peninsula west of King George Island, and 55 people from the other three bases. People who were at the five foreign bases were also evacuated.

The second earthquake occurred near the Andina and Teniente Codelco copper mines and Los Bronces of Anglo American PLC. Sernageomin said workers, operations and mining facilities reported no problems after the earthquake.

Chile is one of the countries in the world most prone to earthquakes. Just off shore, the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes Mountains to ever higher heights. In 2017, one million people were evacuated from their homes after an 8.3 magnitude earthquake.

The strongest earthquake on record occurred in Chile in 1960 when an earthquake measuring 9.5 on the Richter scale rocked. The rift zone stretches an estimated 500 kilometers to nearly 1,000 kilometers along the country's coast. The city most affected by the earthquake was Valdivia. The earthquake left two million people homeless, injured at least 3,000, and killed an estimated 1,655.