Hope the people of Chile have been able to start the recovery from this tragedy.

The newer wineries are basically warehouse construction in many cases, tilt up wall and roof trusses. Even if built to withstand quakes of 7.5 or so, the typical standard, this was an 8.8 magnitude event and will certainly cause some of those structures to collapse.

Wooden tanks often split apart because the weight inside them is enormous. When it is just sitting there, it does not threaten their integrity, but once that weight gets in motion, and with the twisting and thrusting forces in large quakes, many large tanks will simply burst or splinter.

Barrel stacks, unless anchored, will all crash down, and once those barrels, that weigh hundreds of pounds when full, get into motion, they are wrecking machines. In our 1989 quake, some of the pictures of smashed barrels, caused by the violence with which they were thrown around, were almost scary. Many barrels were reduced to kindling. Others were tossed around like Legos.

New tanks would seem to be the most secure, but here again, there is an enormous amount of weight inside them. A violent upward thrust of thousands of pounds of stable liquid turned out to cause the bottoms of many tanks to bulge outward and lose their usefulness even if they did not burst.

And finished goods are also at risk. For those wineries that simply make stacks of filled bottles not in cases, on palates and shrink wrapped, those bottle stacks turn into thousands of flying missiles.

So, lots of damage has to be expected. The weird thing about quakes, however, is that we have seen here how one building can be damaged and its neighbors untouched. One house (remember we are all on slabs here, no foundations) will have it slab broken as the earth twisted underneath it while the next six houses will remain intact. All wineries are on slabs, and even if they do not lose all their wine, it would be likely that some buildings will simply become unuseful because they need to be reconstructed from the ground up.

We are just now seeing on dribs and drabs of info about the Chilean wine industry because the first problem and immediate focus is on resuce and survival. Not a good time for anyone down there.