The earthquake in the city of Chillán (Chile, 1939), antecedent prior to the impact of the 1944 earthquake in the province of San Juan, Argentina

Housing and educational emergency reconstruction work

Abstract

Through the historiographic method of Comparative History, an approach was made between the city of Chillán in 1939 (Chile) after the earthquake, and the City of San Juan in 1944 (Argentina) after the earthquake, to describe general similarities and differences in the Reconstruction processes of emergency. The two cities have a history of being seismic zones, however a situation of such magnitude was not correctly prevented in either of them. The lack of professionals in construction, the savings in material costs, the absence of building techniques and the poor payment of fees to workers, all this is considered by the specialists consulted to be the direct cause of destruction and human losses.

Through the use of first and second-hand unpublished sources, such as magazine articles and hemerographic material recovered from online repositories of the National Digital Library of Chile (El Diario de los Damnificados), Hemerographic sources re-read from the General Archive of the Province of San Juan (Diario Tribuna) and the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina (Diario Esquiu and Periódico Ilustrado Ilustrado Ahora), the research work prepared by Alfredo Castellanos with the results obtained from his situational-environmental diagnosis upon arrival in San Juan, and photographs taken In situ by the teams of professionals who arrived in the province at the time of the events, it was that they managed to approach both cities to work on their stories in common, giving it a novel twist and generating a significant theoretical contribution that promises future investigations.