Sep. 5th, 2010

zeborah: Zebra with stripes shaking (earthquake)
If you want to know what a state of emergency looks like, imagine a suburban street on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon. Neighbours are gardening; the occasional car full of visitors drives along.

Except occasionally the ground shakes, and we're being told to boil water before drinking it, and conserve it by not flushing the toilet; and in the central business district the older brick buildings have strewn rubble in the streets, and welfare centres have opened for people whose homes aren't safe.

(News sources: the radio via my iPod; Civil Defence's Twitter feed linking to regular updates; #eqnz; Geonet's Recent Quakes; and various photo/video/news sites when linked there via Twitter. From about 5am yesterday onwards I was on all of these at once, getting advice on how to make a flush-free toilet from Kim Hill on the radio and advice on how to deal with water from a government website. The uni I work at had their website down due to lack of power, but later in the day they used emergency generators to display announcements that the campus will be closed all next week.)

A few places on the internet are dredging up a comparison with the Haiti earthquake. Yes, it was the same magnitude (we've been revised down to 7.0, last I heard) and something like the same kind. But the reason Haiti was a disaster and Christchurch is an expensive great nuisance (about NZ$2billion damage; one fatality from a heart attack) is simply that Haiti was a disaster zone long before the quake struck.

My house is close to 90 years old but it's made of wood which flexes (and creaks and rattles and rumbles and bangs doors alarmingly, and this morning I discovered I have some colourful bruises on one arm) and then settles back exactly where it was to start with. --Although a colleague's blog post reminder last night that this wasn't actually "the big one", ie the 8+ magnitude earthquake New Zealand gets once every couple hundred years, was not the cheeriest note to go to sleep on. If that was a 7, an 8 is quite high on my Do Not Want list.

But then we've only been getting 4s and 5s as aftershocks. Which in theory I'm getting used to (in theory I can see how one of my sisters experiences earthquakes as comforting), but in practice I much prefer to be sitting in a solid corner when they happen. Talk radios had callers afraid to be sleeping home alone, which I kind of shrugged at until I was getting into bed (still dressed, and having placed my radio, cellphone and asthma medication in my safe spot) and realised that I really Did Not Want to lie on my back with my tender front side all exposed to the evil ceiling. I slept curled on my side instead, woken by a dozen earthquakes in eight hours. (Just 4s and 5s. A couple of times I thought about getting out of bed, but went back to sleep instead.)

Once I thought I heard Boots coming back in and eating some of her kibble. I think that was actually just a 3.something. Boots hid under the bed during the main earthquake, then crept into the wardrobe for the next five hours, then (in obvious disgust at the house) slunk outside, belly low to the ground, and I haven't seen her since. I expect she'll come back when she's less scared.

This morning there are helicopters flying overhead and the occasional siren. Neither is abnormal on an ordinary day, really, but they're a reminder that this isn't exactly an ordinary day.

And the wind is picking up; we're expecting gale force winds for tomorrow, which won't be good for weakened buildings.

But mostly where I am things are very normal. Except for the things that aren't, and wondering how long those will last.
zeborah: Zebra with stripes shaking (earthquake)
My local Freecycle mailing list has someone offering: "Probably going to be no shortage of these over the next wee while but if anyone was after some broken bricks for hardfill etc, we have a small amount from our chimney top [...] probably about 3 or 4 wheelbarrows full."

The website of a restaurant closed due to damage.

Telecom has made around 300 payphones in and around Christchurch free for local, national and mobile calls. They've also waived fees for phone donations to the Red Cross. Yesterday they tweeted "Operations teams working on how best to share our emergency generation capacity with our friends @VodafoneNZ" and when congratulated on their altruism clarified, "It's all about NZers helping NZers in a time of crisis. Normal rivalries will resume once crisis is over :)"

I've heard stories of:
  • a dairy [corner-store] owner giving away milk and selling batteries below cost
  • a pizza place giving away pizzas
Buses aren't running so instead of going to my own church I went to the local Anglican church. Not being an Anglican I don't know whether they might have considered maybe not reading the "Jeremiah and the potter" story about God saying "If you're naughty I'll totally crush you" in the current climate. Yes, yet-another-aftershock did strike exactly then. :-)

Breaking news: Just got a phone call from my manager that everyone in our team is fine though one has been evacuated (she lives in the CBD) and another colleague hasn't been contactable (she lives in another area people have been evacuating from). The library I work in has some damage to our beautiful new ceiling tiles and apparently books are in ginormous piles; the central library on campus has entire stacks (ie bookshelves) fallen over, broken windows, and one floor is said to be "totalled". So now we're waiting to be allowed back in so we can start picking up books...
zeborah: Zebra with stripes shaking (earthquake)
Three wonderful hours. (It looks like there were only a couple of little aftershocks during that time, which explains why I wasn't woken.) I dreamed that we were recovering from an earthquake.

The university has photos of the Central Library and says, "Be aware that the clean up operation will be specialised and is potentially hazardous in some places. For example we have library books mixed with window glass [...]" My manager mentioned that the branches might open before Central Library, now I can really see why.

I just saw my cat. She was hesitating about coming inside so I took her food out to her. She looked interested but too nervous to actually settle down and eat properly. (She might have nommed a bit of kibble or two before a noise distracted her.) On reflection I took half the kibble away in case she does manage to gobble it all at once and get sick; it's two days since she last ate here and if she's this nervous now she probably hasn't been thinking about scavenging either.

The buses still aren't running tomorrow.

The local mall looks like nothing ever happened - and so does the library there. Single-storey probably helps, and I think there's just something about the land in this part of town too.

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