On Saturday night, at 8:36 pm, the country’s interior ministry tweeted a warning that a magnitude 7.1 earthquake had occurred, 216 kilometers (about 134 miles) northeast of the O’Higgins Chilean scientific base, at the tip of Antarctic Peninsula. In its tweet, the ministry called for coastal regions in Antarctica to be evacuated due to the risk of tsunami.
But the ministry mistakenly sent the message to cell phones across the country, asking people to leave coastal areas.
“We want to give peace of mind to the population, to tell them that it is not necessary to evacuate the entire national territory, only the Antarctic base,” said Miguel Ortiz, of the Ministry’s National Emergency Office (ONEMI), at a news conference.
He said the agency regrets the inconvenience caused by his messages, which he attributes to a technical error. The tsunami alert in Antarctica was later withdrawn.
But the clarification came too late to contain the panic. People in coastal cities, including La Serena, north of Santiago, and Valparaíso, began to leave areas close to the coast after the warning – until reports declared it was a false alarm.
While the Chileans reacted to the alert, a second tremor, of magnitude 5.6, struck the region of the Chile-Argentina border, according to the German Geosciences Research Center GFZ. The quake measures 133 km (82.6 miles) in depth and occurred 30 km (18.6 miles) east of Santiago.
No damage was reported in any of the earthquakes.
Sernageomin said that after the first earthquake, 80 people were evacuated from Chile’s main base in Antarctica, President Eduardo Frei Montalva Base, on the Fildes Peninsula, west of King George Island, and another 55 from three other bases, along with five foreign bases.
The second earthquake was near the Andean and Teniente copper mines by Codelco and Los Bronces by Anglo American PLC.
Chilean mining regulator Sernageomin said mining workers, operations and facilities reported no problems after the earthquake.