Zeborah

Once upon a time there was a bus-stop four minutes' walk from my house.

Then there was an earthquake and there were no buses at all. Then they started running for part of the route but the nearest stop was ten minutes away (and my erstwhile 30-minute commute became a 2-hour commute due to omg the traffic, but that's another story). Then some many months later after various permutations of the route My bus-stop started being used again and I might have cried a little.

Then roadworks came to the street. Even before the recent "[image of a roadcone] = progress" propaganda posters went up I've always believed in the sentiment, and the challenge of trying to find a new route across the road every time I want to visit the supermarket is all part of the fun of living in a post-apocalyptic society. (Another is jumping over the semi-filled-in ditches they dig across the footpath away from every house when they're fixing the sewers. It's like playing Super Mario in a virtual reality system.) But it did put My bus-stop out of use again — at least the one I go to on the way to work; the one I get off at on the way home was unaffected.

But tonight! I was on my bus on the way home, and I pressed the buzzer and started collecting my bags. And the bus started slowing down at the lights. And I'm all, "Wtf, driver, don't you know those are flashing orange lights because of the roadworks, you don't need to stop at them!" And then the lights — wait for it — the traffic lights turned red.

So I'm all, "Zeborah, play it cool, this is just a thing traffic lights do." But, I mean, they turned red, so when we reached my bus-stop I said to the driver, "Did those traffic lights just start working today?!"

And he said, "Yeah! And I was like, where are all the roadcones?!"

Which passed me right by like it was just a figure of speech, because pff, you can't have roadworks without roadcones! That's just logic! So we said goodnight in good spirits and I hopped off the bus (carefully so as not to sprain an ankle on a pot-hole). Then, just as I was about to turn into my own street, I chanced to look back the way we'd come and I saw that the roadcones were gone.

(Okay, there are still several scattered at various spots, but it's less in the way of someone having set up roadcones to delimit roadworks, and more in the way of someone having missed picking them up. It'd be pretty easy to overlook a few bright orange cones with reflective stripes, because that sort of thing just blends into the post-apocalyptic landscape along with the "Safety is no accident" hi-vis vests: you only notice them if you're really looking for them.)

I... I think the roadworks are finished?

At least on that side of the road.

And I think that means I'm going to get My bus-stop back.

And you know what that means?

So I was sleeping badly anyway due to my nose having a tendency to block. (Winter, new gas fire drying it up, something like that.)

Then I dreamed I was back in Korea taking a taxi to our apartment, and accidentally got it to drop us off in the wrong apartment block. So we were walking through to get to our own, and came around a corner to where just a few fragments of brick walls remained - fragments of murals painted on what had been the inside - and I realised it was the church I'd last visited there before the quakes, and even though I'd only been there the once it hit me really hard. I had my hand over my nose and mouth just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing...

...and woke up sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, and got the waterworks going too, and then suddenly I thought: Wait, am I actually emotionally affected here or was this just a breathing problem? And I took one deep breath to stop the sobbing and then I was absolutely fine.

So that was anticlimactic; and then my alarm went off before I could get back to sleep. Le sigh. OTOH I've just had too full snowdays off work so I suppose I can't complain too much about going in to work for today.

Oh look! I made you a bonus haiku thing:

I thought, "Wait for spring
to see the cherry blossom," but
here are snow and dawn.

It's official: my old anxiety dream about trying to get students out of the library at closing time but they keep refusing and meanwhile more are coming in...

...has transformed into a new anxiety dream about trying to evacuate students from the library after an earthquake but they keep refusing and meanwhile more are coming in (earthquake? what earthquake?) and also Security won't let me get my bag-that-goes-with-me-everywhere.

(Though otoh, the students were so slow at leaving that I had to stay inside to keep shouting for their attention and must have evaded Security after all because in the end as we were making our way to the assembly point I triumphantly showed someone I had my bag after all.)

Also, level 2 was a maze of a layout complete with bridges to other sections of the library, and the gazillions of fire escapes included a spiral slide made of sleek polished wood. I slid down it. :-)

Today I:

• slept in a nightgown in my own bed
• woke to an alarm clock and not an earthquake
• used and flushed the toilet
• took a shower
• talked to people on the internet
• knew without checking that my friends and family were safe
• baked with electricity
• received a phone call
• went outside without a dust mask
• walked on asphalt rather than mud
• bought some things I needed from the local supermarket
• caught a bus that goes straight from home to work
• worked at my own desk in my own building with my own phone number
• didn't leave work until my scheduled end of day
• came home to find my house and contents as I'd left them
• got a bill in the mail
• put my emptied rubbish bins back in their spots
• fed my cat
• drank water from the tap

and spent a lot of time on or past the point of tears, because I remember.

Because we all remember.

When we had none of this. When we had only fear, and the kindness of strangers, and rumours of destruction and death - rumours replaced by news of worse. Waiting for an ambulance that never came, not just because the traffic was impossible, but because a minor motorcycle accident doesn't rate compared to the CTV building and others.

The official number now is 185 dead.

My memories are the most vivid for me; but for me it's the wider context, the "we", that for joy or sorrow makes me cry. I didn't go to the memorial, because to be confronted right now with that "we" remembering -- I just can't. But I made biscuits for my colleagues, and watched out the window of the bus at the roses, sunflowers, lilies and agapanthuses in roadcones along the way. When I got to work my colleagues who hadn't gone were streaming the ceremony, and I just couldn't, but I brought up the #eqnz Twitter stream and watched the dots mark the 2 minutes silence.

I also spent a lot of time today not thinking about tears, because I had emails and customers and websites and books to deal with. Because, despite being aware that large chunks of the city remain broken, of its people in dim and dire straits, and despite all the new habits formed (by so many of us) from the bone-deep knowledge that any moment the world might turn upside down again, my own life is essentially, weirdly, weirdly unweirdly, back to normal.

But not and never the same.

Because I remember; because we remember.

(Written primarily for fellow ChurChurians interested in the process, so I bid friends elsewhere be tolerant of old news and unexplained dates/terminology.)

There were, in 2010 and 2011, various EQC assessments - the initial post-September one followed by a more thorough one on February 19th; and the initial post-February one followed some months later by a couple of guys with iPads and about a month after that by a report in the mail. My house wasn't that badly damaged - cracks everywhere but mostly cosmetic and the structural damage was pretty minor all considered; all thoroughly inhabitable once the emergency repairs had been taken care of - so I expected to be waiting a while before I heard any further. I was quite happy with that in fact, knowing there are plenty people far worse off than me. Then late last year I got a sudden phone call saying someone else wanted to postpone their repairs (they didn't want it done in the Christmas period) so a slot was available for me.

So things happened in a bit of a rush. I met with the project manager, who I immediately liked. We went over the scope of the work again. I met with the foreman, who I also immediately liked. The original plan was for me to stay in my house while the repairs were carried out, but someone noticed my asthma inhaler and suggested all the plaster dust involved would be a Bad Idea. My cat and I would have to move out.

This was up to me to organise, so I phoned my insurance company. They'd cover accommodation costs for me, but no cattery. A friend suggested somewhere I might get a short-term rental, but it was too short-term for the landlord. I ended up calling the Canterbury Temporary Accommodation Service, which I suspected was not what it's for (they're mainly for redzoned folk) but I hoped they'd be able to point me in the right direction. They put me through a gruelling verbal questionnaire (nothing nasty, just long and much seemed pointless and I was tired; by the end I was almost in tears) and promised to call me back. To my surprise after that inauspicious beginning, they did so very promptly, a lovely woman who confirmed exactly what I needed and within a couple of hours found two motels that would accept me and my cat. I visited both, picked one, and got the insurance company speaking with the motel about payment. There was some kerfuffle regarding documentation the insurance company needed from EQC and my EQC contact needing some repeated nagging to send it, but it happened in the end.

I packed my house into boxes - fortunately renovations weren't extensive enough that I had to worry about storage, they could just shift things around inside as they went - and moved into the motel for three and a half weeks. (The motel owner was fantastic and left me to my own devices during this time, other than giving me free wifi and the run of the laundry, so it was like a second home except my cat hated it and yowled every time someone next door turned on their spapool.) The 3.5 weeks would let the contractors do most of the work, let me get back home, and then they could finish off the other bits around me.

I popped in a couple of times a week to pick up mail and keep track of things; there was a sign-in sheet I had to use the same as the contractors did.

...There were delays. I'm not sure what happened in the first week other than "very little"; I think some of it involved supply bottlenecks. In the second week things really took off. Of course then in one room when they stripped the lining paper, chunks of the wall fell out. This caused more delay... They pulled the bricks down from the fireplace, which necessitated removing the gas fire, then discovered the gas fire wasn't up to standard so couldn't be put back in. So they were running a bit behind schedule, and then did I mention the day I was meant to move back in was December 23?

So December 23 happened. After a suitable length of time had passed, I sent a text message saying I hoped they were okay and should I plan on staying on at the motel? They phoned back saying someone had fallen off a ladder but just got a bruise, and though a bunch of the guys had wanted to go home to their families the foreman had got them to stay long enough to make the place at least habitable for me to return as planned.

For this alone, I'd ♥ them forever; it really was above and beyond.

So I was home for Christmas. And right from (I forget, the 26th or 27th), and every day except Jan 1st itself, they were there from morning to evening valiantly working on various rooms around me. This was all by arrangement, I hasten to add; they were very happy to work around my schedule. But I was fine to fit in around them too, to get it done. Admittedly it had its inconveniences. The "no curtains and no lighting in the bedroom" thing was okay - being summer, I just took to going to bed when it got dark and getting up when it got light. The paintfumes and my asthma meant I had to keep the windows always open, but it was good weather. I tend to spend great amounts of time sitting in one place on my laptop anyway, so it didn't matter that a couple of rooms at a time were out-of-bounds, but ducking under scaffolding every time I needed to go to the bathroom or make myself a snack was irritating, especially when someone was busy painting said bathroom. (Again I'm certain they'd have got out of my way if I'd been irritated enough to ask.) So sometimes I escaped for an afternoon to friends or family; and in due course I was back at work anyway.

It was mid-January before we got to the point where most things were done. (Relined and painted almost every room in my house, often including skirting boards and windows; rejibbed ceilings; repiled a section of flooring; hammered out an old hearth to put in new flooring there and polish the whole floor in one room; eased doors and cupboards; filled cracks in the foundation ring; replastered the doorsteps; put up new weatherboards where an old chimney was and repainted the whole wall to make sure the colour matched; filled cracks in the garage walls; and various bits and bobs I'm forgetting. And cleaned up of course, and got someone to tidy the garden where they'd been working, and mowed all the lawns.)

At that point I did a walk-through with the foreman to see what remained. Some things were waiting for something (suppliers on holiday delayed the leadlight window and apparently Canterbury Heating has one person who has to sign off on everything in the whole city and is on extended holiday so the gasfire's on hold); some things had been forgotten; some things had become issues along the way - like painters getting a tad sloppy about the dropcloths, so needing to clean up paint or even repaint surfaces; or an admittedly fragile dining table getting its legs dragged off (they repaired it) or a chest of drawers getting a corner irreparably bashed off (the foreman was horrified, asked how I wanted to handle it, and promptly accepted my suggestion).

Of course, Murphy's Law, after the walk-through I noticed a couple of other things. And for a day or two there I thought we were going to get trapped in an endless cycle of painters repainting over paint spilled while repainting something else. (Important Life Lesson: No job is too small for a dropcloth!) What really helped was when I typed up the list of what I thought still needed to be done and gave them a couple of copies so it was all clear and they could tick the things off as they went.

All along the way, they were the most fantastic people ever. They fitted in around me, fixed everything I pointed out, even did a few small things that weren't technically in scope but they couldn't bear to leave undone. And these are people whose own homes are damaged and are waiting on EQC themselves (conflict of interest to work on their own properties, of course), and have other earthquake-related things going on in their lives. Plus, while the newspapers are full of Bad Contractor stories, I heard some Bad Homeowner stories to match....

So finally we got to signoff. (With the exception of the leadlight window and gasfire; these exceptions were noted on the signoff form. Also there's a 90-day period in case anything makes itself apparent later.) This involved me, the foreman, the project manager, and an EQC person walking around to check everything yet again, and then I signed.

To be honest there were a couple of niggles. I ended up taking down a curtain rail and putting it up the right way around myself; I've also been cleaning up some small remaining paint spills with meths. But they've just essentially renovated my whole friggin' house after a series of major natural disasters, so I've got zero complaints.

--Well, almost zero. The January aftershocks have dropped the floor in my toilet, which aside from wrinkling all the lino there and in the laundry, has structural implications; and cracked the fresh paintwork at every corner of the exterior, causing weatherproofing issues. So I could grumble about that a bit.... Ah well, one EQC claim settled, another one to file!

because when I arrived for the Christmas Eve service there was a sign saying "Welcome: please use alternate entrance" and the alternate entrance led to the back lawn where several rows of chairs were set up. Apparently the cracks in the (brick) church have widened enough that they want to get an assessment before risking having the congregation in there, especially as the cracks are in the side where the emergency exits are located. They'd managed to get the sound system in position just inside the ranch sliders of the lounge, with the piano and lectern and Advent candles, but the sun was far too bright to allow for a projector even if that system was mobile.

We had to add another row chairs as people kept arriving. (Some brought picnic blankets but we didn't have to resort to that.) It did cool a little as the evening progressed and clouds drifted across the sky, but not badly.

Sound didn't carry very well -- we kept singing either faster or slower than the piano, which at one point got so bad our minister was cracking up -- but it was surprising effective being outside with the rustle of the wind in the trees: it fit with the shepherds and the straw in the manger much better than a brick building does. It reminded me of the New Zealand carol Te Harinui, "The people gathered round upon the grassy ground to hear the preacher say 'I bring to you today Te Harinui, glad tidings of great joy.'"

While my house is nominally being fixed (they were meant to start on the 28th; they actually started late on the 30th and did a bit more on the 1st and nothing on the 2nd; I can tell these things with my super powers of reading the sign-in sheet) Boots and I have moved into a motel.

I think Boots is actually more or less settled, though it took some time. She spent the first 30 hours hiding under furniture - no food, no water, no litterbox. Then she spent an evening hugging my ankle, and then she spent all frickin' night scritching things and jumping on things and jumping off things (onto my nose) and banging things and trying to open things and generally preventing me from getting more than an hour's sleep at a time. (The asthma attack at 4am didn't help. I ended up going outside and sitting in a deck chair which turned out to have rain in it, and then I slept on the couch for the last hour of the night, and then I went to work and blinked blearily at everyone.)

For a few more days after that she spent the day (while I was out) under the bed and then crept out to hug my ankle when I got back, and then spent the night under the bed again. Nibbling a very little food here and there. But now she's eating fairly reasonably for an outdoors cat being kept indoors and is playing a bit more normally and sleeping on the bed next to my ankles as per usual.

It's weird living out of a motel in my own city, but it's all fine: I've got everything I need (including wifi and the run of the laundry) and it's comfortably lived in (so not intimidating the way I find hotels). I'll still of course be glad to go home. The date set for that is the 22nd December, and I'm determined to believe them despite all evidence to the contrary. They sound like they're determined to give excellent customer service, and I've heard from other people who've had repairs start slow but finish on time, so it's not impossible.

The other day, a friend asked where I was and when I told them they said, "Oh, that's good, there's lots of shops there." It's more that there were lots of shops there, I pointed out. Since the quakes, the fruit-and-vege shop, the two bakeries, and the supermarket (among others) are all deaded, which as far as the necessities of life go leaves the butcher, the petrol station, and a 2nd hand bookshop. I can shop at a mall on the way home instead, but.... But as I stay longer I notice there's more than I thought, because one of the bakeries is operating out of a shipping container, and the fruit-and-vege place is operating out of a tent.

Walking down the road from the motel towards my busstop in the morning, I can see straight down to a demolition crane in the CBD. I have feelings about this but they're fairly vague and unformed. They're oddly different from the feelings I feel on my normal bus route where I see the crane pulling apart the Catholic Cathedral and the crane taking the top off the Hotel Grand Chancellor and various bulldozers painting the town pink with brickdust. I think it's because it takes time for the bus to get me that far, but here I leave my motel at 7:15 in the morning and there it is.

I seem to have started writing my When the Sky Fell story again. May or may not get much further this time around, though today I reached the Ode to the Radio scene which I've never got to before. It aches to write, and there came a point this evening doing research where I had to stop reading mid-sentence. Someone was talking about the "glassy, shell-shocked look" people had after February and. I remember that, when I was walking along Bealey Ave on the 25th February; I mentioned it in a blogpost at the time, but. Words just don't. It's like looking into a black hole where a person should be.

--However, the other thing that happened on the 25th February was my friends' son was born, and yesterday when I went to visit (as I do most weeks) he crawled! Towards me! Seeing him once a week is fantastic, I get to skip the nappies and most of the teething and "I'm hungry but won't eat, tired but won't sleep" screaming fits, while still getting all the fun of playing with him and the excitement of watching him grow up. I heartily recommend being an honorary auntie.

When I was in the Netherlands... wow, over five, six years ago now? I got a gorgeous red skirt, which has ever since been my favourite, but has unfortunately suffered fading and much fraying of the hem and embroidery. During the snowdays this year, when I was snowed in with my friend on the other side of town, I passed the time taking the hem up (it's still ankle-length; it's a wonderfully long skirt, and it took time because it's a wonderfully full skirt), but it's been sitting around for the last couple of months waiting for me to get the dye. I finally got that on Wednesday on the way to meeting undisclosed people for coffee (about something that... may come to something, I'm not certain) and have just followed all the instructions for dying the skirt red again.

Now just to wait for it to dry. I'm not sure if it's a bit more cherry red than when I bought it or if it had just faded that much but I'm pretty certain it's going to look fantastic either way.

Must be time for an earthquake update:

• at work they're knocking down the buildings on either side of the building I worked in. We should be able to move back in early next year. Current plan is to then in another year's time cram us into the main library and randomly give the space away to other departments, which makes me furious, but I'm resigned to being made furious by decisions there. (They're hurting financially due to earthquake costs and lost revenue from students going elsewhere; but I'm convinced many of the proposed decisions are false economies.) Plus a key person has recently resigned so who knows?
• the cordons around town have shrunk a bit more and there's a new bus exchange. (Since February, there've been two bus exchanges which each consisted of a bus parked on the side of the road for shelter and some portaloos. They were great, but y'know?) It consists of driveways, electronic signage, outdoor seating, and some prefabs with toilets and indoor seating, and it looks fantastic. It abuts demolition sites and cordons. At night everything beyond it is pitch black. In the day, you can see machines pouring asphalt on a space that used to be something, and beyond that the hole in the wall of an upper floor of the pre-February bus exchange building; and the bus coming in goes past the demolition of the Salvation Army outlet store that yesterday was merely abandoned and unhappy, and the the bus going out comes past the vertical blinds fluttering in the broken windows of the City Council building.
• reservoirs and other components of the water system are still so damaged we're already being given summer water restrictions (which many years we never need, but if we did it'd be at least January before they started) - no unattended outdoor watering, and handheld watering only on three days a week (Tues/Thurs/Sat for even-numbered houses, Wed/Fri/Sun for odd-numbered, Monday entirely banned).
• apparently City Mall is opening soon (this weekend? or Show Weekend, which is in two weeks?) in box containers. (There are already box container shops operating in scattered locations, eg a dairy aka corner store which has recently sprouted a "Coffee coming soon" sign.) The newspaper claims that some place in the UK is threatening to sue for us stealing their idea, which outraged me until I remembered that the business of newspapers is to recount the truth in such a way as to mislead people into being outraged enough to buy the newspaper, and I'm not sufficiently interested to investigate what's actually going on in this case (quite possibly all they said was "Please don't use our brand name"). They're getting pwned on their Facebook page in either case.
• the public libraries that had been still closed - eg space taken over for council work and such - have been slowly reopening; and there's a new small one on the edge of town; and my local relocated one is opening for another hour in the day which'll make it possible for me to get there during the week. Also the local mall continues to open new shops.
• CEISMIC has launched - a portal for earthquake stories and other information about the events.
• my choir's singing a tribute song which is gorgeous music but truly appallingly sappy-wappy words, I cannot express.
• state of the Zeborah: I don't like sirens from emergency response vehicles. I especially don't like sirens from more than one emergency response vehicle at a time. I'm mostly okay with helicopters, though sometimes they're disconcerting (this one for instance; must be the fourth time it's passed). I'm also mostly okay with aftershocks, as much as one can be of course, but unidentified rumbles hold my attention until I've identified exactly what they are even if I know that whatever it was it wasn't an earthquake. In an unfamiliar place I'll often (but not always) do a quick "If there was a big earthquake right now I would..." spotcheck; sometimes I'll then get a wee "There could be a big earthquake right now" gutkick, but a breath or two fixes that, whereas sirens require more breathing and often blinking too. I empathise more closely, tear up more easily, with stories of disaster or personal loss or communities coming together. In other words, all perfectly normal and of no concern.

It's been a while since we had much aftershock activity -- the unprecedented pair of snowstorms we had three weeks apart seems to have insulated against them or something, which was one good thing about the snow. (I also enjoyed playing in it and having time off work; otoh I didn't like being cut off from being able to feed my cat, twice; and it made life harder for people who didn't need life being made harder in the slightest.)

But we did get a 4.2mag. aftershock at 5am-ish today, which seems to have ruined a lot of people's mornings. My own reaction was a groggy, "Bah, I'm not letting a piddly - hmm, feels like a low 4 - stop me sleeping in." And went back to sleep. From evidence, the cat's reaction was similar, which is gratifying progress.

In other recent EQ news, I got my letter from EQC listing all the damage the inspectors noticed while they were around here. It takes a page and a half, each line being one wall or ceiling or window or other feature, notated with a super-brief "Collapsed chimney" / "Structural damage" / "Floor has moved less than 100mm" / "Impact damage" etc. I also get a "Broken glass" and "Broken power fittings" and "Cracks to ring foundation", but the vast majority is "Cosmetic damage".

There's also a new Red Cross grant which was called the Alternatives to Sewerage Systems grant until someone noticed the acronym and changed it to something I can't remember because it's nowhere near as fun. Anyway it's NZ$500 for anyone who went without city sewerage for more than 90 days, and after a few days of being vaguely aware of the grant, it suddenly occurred to me that that included me again.

This perfectly solves my voucher-from-work dilemma: I can pass said voucher on to Women's Refuge and never have to think about it again, and use the grant money to buy myself something nice without any unpleasant aftertaste about where it came from (plus not limited to shopping at the single mall).

On the subject of Red Cross grants, there are three broad philosophies:

1) the Red Cross is making it too easy for people to get money;
2) the Red Cross is making it too hard for people to get money;
3) the Red Cross is doing pretty well actually, as evidenced by the fact that the Letters to the Editor display a perfect balance between philosophy #1 and philosophy #2.

My uncle, it turned out at my Mum's sixtieth birthday dinner, holds philosophy #1, believing that the Red Cross should investigate more exactly which people need exactly how much money. My sisters pointed out that investigating would cost money and delay people getting anything, and corrected him on some points of fact, all the while referring to the Red Cross as "we" (with admirably faint emphasis) until it clicked for him and there was this brief pause and he said, slightly horrified, "You mean you both work for the Red Cross?"

This is how my family celebrates our sixtieth birthdays, people! --Actually it was all good, and we stuffed ourselves full of mains and dessert and cake and then went to Scared Scriptless (a theatre sports show which is a Christchurch institutions -- their normal venue has been red-zoned so they've been bouncing around, at the moment performing in an intermediate school's auditorium) which was brilliant as usual. (I mean there was the game that's funny because foreign people have silly accents, and the game that's funny because date rape's hilarious, and the games that are funny because homophobia and transphobia; but y'know, it was my Mum's birthday so I'm just going to give in to the kyriarchy this once.) The brilliantest thing was that one of my family managed to get a note slipped to their coordinator about Mum's birthday, and so he asked her some questions and then got the guys in the team (yes, they're all guys, this may have something to do with the kyriarchy both cause and effect; see also the demographics of QI and the predictable "Women just must not be as funny as men" that you get when you point this out to fans on their fan-forum, but that's a story for another day) -- anyway, he got them to improvise a song for her which really was utterly fantastic.

Oh oh! And apparently my bus, my normal bus, my dear #23, is now running out my way again! I saw it! This means I could catch it straight from here straight to the door of my work again! --If that building is ever my workplace again, anyway, which to our rage and dismay is sounding increasingly unlikely, but that's a rant for another day. In the meantime the #21 gets me almost-straight from here straight to my current workplace, just takes a bit longer.

I dithered, with my icecream post last night, whether to tag it 'earthquake' because as time goes by and we return to daily life, daily life remains tinged with earthquake. But this one is definitely all about the earthquake.

After September, every building in the city got red, orange, and green placards depending on its damage. After February we got them again. At work, photocopiers and other electronic equipment got red, orange and green stickers. There was a lot of triage going on.

After February, initially there was only one red zone, which was basically the CBD. It got subdivided into zones that allowed various levels of entry to business owners and the public, but it was The Red Zone.

Then there was the sewerage map. There's a huge red zone (most of the eastern city) which didn't so much mean that there'd never been problems elsewhere, jut if there were problems elsewhere they had to use portaloos rather than chemical toilets. Up to June, the red area was slowly getting encroached on with green, meaning you could stop using the chemical toilets and go back to porcelain. My house got into a green area, but there were some red area houses just across the street (plus once I'm in a habit it's easier to continue even when it's an annoying habit) so I held off. There was quite a lot of green, actually, but then the June 13 quakes happened and someone took a vast red paintbrush to it; now there's just a few green patches.

(Incidental note: red vs green really is not ideal for colorblind people, even if it is tradition. They should add texture.)

The new set of zones that everyone's talking about now, though, is zones for land. My land is zoned green, though I've got a number of colleagues in red (not worth rebuilding on, owners will get government compensation), orange (needs more assessment), or white (hasn't been assessed yet).

On government compensation for people who had the unmitigated gall not to be able to afford insurance like all decent citizens:

You've got a choice: you can give this person a lump sum now so they can get back on their feet immediately and be a productive member of society. Or you can give them installments later when they're on the welfare system. I'm pretty sure everyone knows that paying for something upfront is always cheaper than paying for it in installments, right? Same thing. Really you owe it to yourself and your taxes to just give them the money now, because it'll cost you less in the longterm.

(For some reason, lots of twitter folk could not understand this.)