Alberto Rozas grabbed his seven year old daughter, Fernanda, and pulled her into the doorway of their bathroom when Concepcion, Chile, started to to shake with one of the strongest earthquakes on record at 3:34 AM Sunday morning. A few moments later they were falling, thirteen stories down as the brand new apartment building they lived tumbled sideways. When it was over, Rozas looked up and saw “the light of the full moon” streaming down through windows that were now skylights.
Thankfully Rozas and Fernanada weren’t hurt. ”The earthquake and the fall were one single, horrible thing,” Rozas told The Associated Press on Sunday. ”I held onto her and she never let me go.” Rozas took Fernanda to his wife’s home and returned to help firefighters understand the layout of the building so they could get to his neighbors, many of whom were trapped in the rubble.
One of those neighbors, Abel Torres, 25, had just gotten home from his nightclub job when the quake hit. ”My TV fell on top of me and suddenly I saw stars shooting across my window,” he said. Torres and his apartment mate crafted a ladder out of ruined furniture in order to reach the windows, now far above them. Another family in the building was saved by their two year old son, Oliver. Oliver stared to cry just moments before the earthquake began, drawing both of his parents into his room. Oliver’s room was the only part of their apartment to survive the quake, had his parents not come to comfort him, they would have died.
So far, twenty three people have been rescued from the fifteen-story Rio Alta building and seven bodies have been removed. As of several hours ago sixty people were still trapped.
