The big shake

I've been away a week. That might not sound like much, but considering the amount of things that happened in that timespan, it feels like ages. It's the first time a natural disaster strikes so hard so close to my home.

Chile, luckily, survived this monster (500 times bigger than the Haiti earthquake a few months before) with only a fraction of the number of deaths that Haiti had, but man, that's gonna be a week I'll never forget.
To begin with, I was awake at 3:30 AM that Saturday. Why? Dunno, out of all the days I could have decided to stay up late, I decided to stay awake that one. Something rather scary on TV about how maybe dinosaurs might have been killed by mosquitoes and diseases instead of meteorites was on. I was too sleepy to actually be watching, but there I was. Suddenly, a low, deep rumble kicked the earth, and everything in my room rattled. It became stronger. I went around the room, putting stuff, like the laptop, that dangled from the edge of my desk in safer places and went to bed. Went back to bed!?!? Really! I thought it would go away!
That's when it hit my mind that something was awfully wrong. The TV rattled and the signal went out. It returned for a millisecond but then all the lights went out. My bed swayed in every direction possible with force, and Sweetie, one of our pets slept on it, oblivious of everything. Now the alarm went off in my brain; ''Save your ass!'', and in one swoop  picked up the fat little dog and went under my bed, feeling how the floor wasn't solid anymore, and hoping that the metal framework would save my life. The room was pitch black, but the sound of glass around the house smashing into bits and huge, hefty rocks falling was reason enough to imagine the chaos outside my room. Something that sounded like a wall came crashing down close by. My bookshelves vomited out all their contents, dozens of books and things came raining down. At that moment, all that went through my mind was prayers to my family who slept in the second floor of the house, hoping that they wouldn't come crashing down on me. Please stop, please stop! I squeezed Sweetie; she had no damn idea of what was going on. The 2 and a half minutes under the bed were the longest I've ever felt. When is this going to end?
Even when the silence after the disaster kicked in, it took me a minute to get back on my senses. Nerve-wracked, if that expression exists, I cautiously got out of my room, in almost total darkness (the street lights stopped working outside the house), armed with the tiny glow of my cellphone, the only light I had at hand. Immediately I saw a massive rock-like thing on the floor; the marble column and the big black rock-with-a-face-sculpture had fallen down. Now imagine, the force required to topple half a ton of rocks! That marble column had a metre in diameter, and it's base was smashed into many large chunks. A million glass shards around the house. A chandelier, resting on a table, having dented it somewhat. I tiptoed around broken marble, went up the stairs and ''greeted'' my family. We were all okay, much to our relief. The house survived, and thus did we. But we were isolated from the world from now on. Cellphone service? Down. Telephone? Briefly. Radio? At first we couldn't pick up any sign of life, until someone on the radio unfolded before us the full size of the catastrophe, well, what they knew at that moment. We didn't know what happened to the rest of the country, and as most communication lines were cut out, it was the outside world that knew more about the disaster than Chile itself did. We were cut from the world...