On Saturday evening, at 20:36, the country’s interior ministry tweeted a warning that there had been a magnitude 7.1 earthquake at 216 kilometers northeast of the Chilean scientific base O’Higgins, in the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. In its tweet, the ministry called for the evacuation of the coastal regions of Antarctica due to a tsunami risk.
But the ministry mistakenly sent the message to mobile phones across the country, urging people to leave coastal areas.
“We want to provide peace of mind to the population, tell them that it is not necessary to evacuate the entire national territory, only the Antarctic base,” Miguel Ortiz of the ministry’s National Emergency Office (ONEMI) told a news conference. .
He said the agency regretted the inconvenience caused by its messages, which it blamed for a technical error. The tsunami warning for Antarctica was later lifted.
But the clarification came too late to curb the panic. People in coastal cities like La Serena, north of Santiago and Valparaiso, began leaving areas near the coast after the warning, until reports declared it a false alarm.
As the Chileans reacted to the warning, a second 5.6-magnitude quake struck the Chile-Argentina border region according to the GFZ’s German Geosciences Research Center. The quake measured a depth of 133 km (82.6 miles) and occurred 30 km (18.6 miles) east of Santiago.
No damage was reported from any of the quakes.
Sernageomin said that after the first earthquake, 80 people were evacuated from Chile’s main base in Antarctica, President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s base on the Fildes Peninsula, west of King George Island, and 55 plus three other bases, along with five foreign bases.
The second earthquake was near the Andean and Teniente copper mines in Codelco and Los Bronces in Anglo American PLC.
Chilean mining regulator Sernageomin said workers, mines and mining facilities had not reported problems after the quake.