On the 22nd of May, 1960, a massive earthquake hit the city of Concepcion, near Santiago, in Southern Chile. At 9.5 on the moment–magnitude scale, it was the largest in recorded history—bigger than a huge quake that wrecked the same region 20 years earlier.  As previously, it set tidal waves (called tsunamis these days) in motion and once again a huge wave raced on across the width of the Pacific Ocean, flattened the city of Hilo on the big Hawaiian island as it passed and carried on to swamp coastal towns in Japan with sufficient force to kill 200 people there. The tsunami caused damage in Tahiti, New Zealand and California, and even forced a minor tidal waves through the heads into Sydney Harbour. Back at the source in Chile, thirteen volcanoes began to erupt. Ten towns were destroyed. 6000 people died.
    The newspapers were full of stunning pictures of the damage, maps of the rippling waves, parking meters bent horizontal, ships inland, multiple volcanic plumes, naked children crying amongst the rubble. I was every bit as awed as I should have been. For the first time I realised the vulnerability of life and understood that my world was not as entirely safe a place as I had previously imagined. Each morning and evening I ran to bring in the paper—a task I more commonly had to be yelled at several times to accomplish—and gobbled up the details of the ongoing horror while shivering in my pyjamas under the streetlight, before delivering it to my plainly more cold-hearted mother. There would be other even greater earthquakes and disasters but none of them would hit me like this one did. As I recall it, it frightens me still.