SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - When an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale struck Chile on the early morning of Feb. 27, Terri Bugg was shaken out of bed.

Terri Bugg dons her pack on Feb. 23, two hours before boarding her flight to Lima, Peru. The Yellowknife resident was in the seaport city of Valparaiso in central Chile when a massive earthquake struck on Feb. 27. - Daron Letts/NNSL photo

The 32-year-old Yellowknife resident had flown into the Chilean capital of Santiago from Lima, Peru, earlier that evening. She arrived in the hillside seaport city of Valparaiso in central Chile to visit friends just hours before the quake rocked the coastal South American country.

"I was trying to sleep at about 3:30 a.m. or so, or whenever it was, and the house started to shake," she recalled two days after the quake. "I wasn't sure what it was. Then the house lurched back and forth and things were falling so we ran out of the house and stood in the doorway. Then the earth shook really hard. I remember looking at the face of the hill and seeing a cascade of rubble. It sounded like rain. I realized I was in an earthquake."

According to the latest state estimates, the earthquake has claimed about 800 lives and injured thousands more near the epicenter in the city of Concepcion, about 480 km south of Valparaiso.

"It has been difficult for us here to know except by word of mouth what is really going on," Bugg said. "In some places we can get the news if the people have electricity. There is power sporadically in certain places, and we have been finding out what happened in the south and everyone is very shaken up because the greatest magnitude and damage of the earthquake just missed us. There is damage to Valparaiso, but nothing near to what happened in the southern areas."

Some building facades crumbled, walls cracked and the narrow streets were littered with bricks and debris. Power and phone lines collapsed and water lines burst. Aftershocks and tremors continued for about two days, Bugg said.

"We are sending our blessings to everyone in the south who lost loved ones and homes," she said. "I'm very grateful, but very sad. For so many families this is a terrible, terrible tragedy."

Back in Yellowknife, Bugg's mom, Vicenta Bugg, said she is relieved her daughter is safe.

"I felt very concerned, but when she got in touch (on Sunday afternoon) I was feeling a bit better," she said. "This is her third world travel so I am very confident in my daughter. She is very adventurous."

Bugg, who is travelling alone, has been staying in hostels since the quake. Her backpack was rerouted to Salt Lake City, Utah, when the plane it was on could not land in Santiago, so she is wearing borrowed clothes.

Bugg is scheduled to fly to Peru later this month to study Spanish for a few weeks and then to Bolivia to volunteer at a research station that is studying titi monkeys in the wild. She plans to travel through Ecuador, Costa Rica and Guatemala before returning to Yellowknife by August.

In another part of the Pacific Ocean, Yellowknife resident Diana Curtis and her family were also awoken early on the morning of Feb. 27, on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Sirens blared at 6:30 a.m. in the Ka'anapali region where they were vacationing. The loud warning came in response to the quake off the coast of Chile.

"We flicked the TV on and we saw the news that there's this tsunami warning," Curtis said. "Everyone was preparing for a possible evacuation."

Later that morning, planes and helicopters flew low over the beach as residents and tourists were instructed to move to higher ground, she said.

The family joined a crowd of 200 other people as they walked for 20 minutes in an orderly fashion to a train station on high ground. They waited under the shade of some palm trees for almost four hours, but a tsunami never came. An all-clear horn sounded and the scare was over.

"It was scary though nothing happened, thank goodness," Curtis said. "The state handled everything very well. We were taken care of and everyone is safe."

The Curtis family returned to Yellowknife yesterday.