The country’s Home Office tweeted a warning at 8:36 p.m. Saturday night that an earthquake measuring 7.1, 216 kilometers (about 134 miles) northeast of the O’Higgins Chilean scientific base at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The ministry in its tweet called for coastal regions of Antarctica to be evacuated due to a tsunami risk.
But the ministry erroneously sent the message to cell phones across the country, urging people to abandon coastal areas.
“We want to reassure the population and 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 regrets the inconvenience caused by the messages, which he blamed for a technical error. The tsunami warning for Antarctica was later lifted.
But the clarification came too late to control panic. People in coastal cities, including La Serena, north of Santiago, and Valparaiso, began leaving areas near the coast after the warning – until reports declared it a false alarm.
While Chileans responded to the warning, a second quake of 5.6 hit the Chile-Argentina border region according to the GFZ German Geoscience Research Center. The quake measured at a depth of 133 km (82.6 miles) and occurred 30 km (18.6 miles) east of Santiago.
No damage was reported to any earthquake.
Sernageomin said that after the first earthquake, 80 people from Chile’s main base in Antarctica, the Presidents Eduardo Frei Montalva base on Fildes Peninsula west of King George Island, and 55 more from three other bases, along with five foreign bases , has been evacuated.
The second earthquake was near Codelco’s Andina and Teniente copper mines and Anglo American PLC’s Los Bronces.
Chilean mining regulator Sernageomin said workers, mining operations and facilities after the quake reported no problems.