At 6:34 UT on February 27,2010, an 8.8 earthquake hit offshore of Maule, Chile near the city of Conception’. Such a large earthquake coming on the heels of the recent ones in Tonga, Haiti, China, and Turkey, each with a great loss of life in just a few months is cause for great concern. This earthquake, the largest in 50 years and one of the largest ever recorded in modern times, was unique among many earthquakes of these past few decades.

As the reports came in concerning the efforts by Chilean authorities to cope with this huge disaster, we realized why their efforts were met with such daunting challenges. Thanks to the efforts of the nation’s people to upgrade their country’s building codes, perhaps many hundreds of thousands of lives were saved. However, what faced this nation in terms of sheer destruction was, I feel, perhaps unequaled in modern history, for such a small nation.