Análisis de resultados

On the morning of April 30, 2008, the inhabitants of Chaitén were awoken by unusual seismic movements. The same day, regional authorities established a Regional Emergency Operation Centre (COE) to monitor the situation. By law, COEs are established by the jurisdictional authority —e.g. the Mayor at the municipal level— and are to work with other local institutions and community organisations which have the responsibility of evaluating, managing and taking action in a specific emergency (Ministerio del Interior y Seguridad Pública, 2002). The COE, headed by the Intendente of Los Lagos Region, Sergio Galilea, included local services such as carabineros, Navy, health service, fire service, army and some neighbouring

organisations. According to several interviewees, since the establishment of the regional COE, some issues have arisen. A local leader and a resident who attended such meetings refer to it as follows:

“These meetings were very strange because from the beginning they [authorities] said that the tremors were only seismic activity without risks [of stronger quakes] [...] they explained to us about the tectonic movements. But in reality they had no idea [...] because there was an eruption two days later [...] The meetings always started about the movements and tremors, and from the very beginning the discussions used to turn into local problems such as connectivity, poverty, abandonment and other non-related things”.

(Pablo Carcamo, male, Community leader, March 2013, interview) “Nobody really knew what was going on [...] even when the authority tried to explain to us with figures and drawings that these movements where tectonic, we knew that they were not [...] many people used to point to the volcano [...] in the end, people were right”.

(Isabel Jimenez, female, North Chaitén resident, March 2013, interview) What emerges from the above transcript is a lack of information about the nature of the hazard, producing uncertainty and concern among the population, something that would later stimulate distrust in authorities: this will be examined throughout this chapter and in Chapter Six. Community leaders assert that regional authorities tried to minimise the importance of tremors prior to the disaster, thus hindering preventive and preparedness actions. Contemplating risks is always difficult, especially with a lack of information, but beyond this, it seems evident that the authorities minimised not only scientific evidence but also people’s claims and concerns.

During the first days of the emergency prior to the eruption, SERNAGOMIN26 _tried to figure out the source of the tremors by flying over the nearest volcano, Michimahuida, 30 kilometres away from Chaitén (see Figure 5.11). The state service failed to identify the Chaitén volcano because there were no data or records about this volcano before then.

Figure 5.11. Map of the Province of Palena CH 7 CH 7 Chaitén Chaitén Volcano Chaitén Michimahuida 0 3.5 7 Kilometres Legend Austral Highway Blanco river Volcanoes Local airport

Source: elaborated by the author (2017); satellite image from Google Earth Pro (2016)

This lack of accuracy in identifying the source of the quakes led to confusion among the authorities for some time until they decided that more investigations were required. After the eruption, the director of the volcanic programme at SERNAGEOMIN, Luis Lara, estimated that the last eruption of the Chaitén volcano may had occurred around 400 years previously; however, months later, reports from SERNAGEOMIN confirmed that the latest eruption of the Chaitén volcano may have occurred around 9,500 years ago (Covarrubias, 2008). In 2008, the Southern Andean Volcano Observatory (OVDAS) had no records on the existence of the Chaitén volcano, and therefore there were no related hazard maps, evacuation routes and emergency plans. OVDAS is the state technical institution part of SERNAGEOMIN whose task is to monitor and determine the most dangerous volcanoes in Chile. In the days after the eruption, SERNAGEOMIN and other researchers would call the Chaitén volcano a ‘dormant volcano’ or, in Spanish, volcán dormido (Dzierma and Wehrmann, 2012). Another community leader refers to this situation:

“It was a feeling that the authorities and the specialists had no idea, really no idea [...] they were insisting that Michimahuida [the volcano] had erupted, so we were not at risk [...] the next day they discovered that was the Chaitén volcano, here! Just ten kilometres [from the city] […] we were lucky we had time to run”.

(Angela Rodriguez, female, Community leader, September 2013, interview) In these interview extracts, it is possible to observe a conflict between residents and the authority on evaluating government reactions in the early days. The initial government reaction is crucial to understanding Chaiteninos’ post-disaster erosion of trust of national authorities, which progressed alongside the evacuation, recovery, relocation and reconstruction. This erosion of trust in authorities is considered here an unsafe condition, as a lack of trust can negatively alter future DRM and DRR actions, as well as lessening the effects of compensatory and recovery policies (Cutter et al., 2003). I will corroborate this with more evidence when reviewing the rest of the policy responses to the disaster. This includes the compensatory strategy, the relocation of Chaitén and reconstruction.

Another reflection from those first days is how quickly regional authorities — especially the Intendente Sergio Galilea— took control over the emergency, which tells us about the verticality of the model of DRM. This is coherent with Mena’s observations (2016) about how often disaster emergencies in Chile tend to be treated by authorities in the upper levels of government.

The next section reviews how decision-making about the evacuation and the constitution of the national COE can be considered powerful examples of the top- down approach during emergencies in Chile, and how this approach may affect vulnerability in the future.