I wrote the blog on Monday shortly after it had occurred. Since then much has happened.
Throughout the day friends and family contacted each other either by phone, in person or by text. It was the strangest of days. The city was eerily quiet with the CBD shut down while engineers visited buildings to determine whether they were safe to reenter. Roads were cordoned off because of glass or the risk of falling masonery. Fortunately it was a fine day.
Throughout the day we continued to feel aftershocks but with decreasing frequency and for the most part decreasing intensity. Radio New Zealand continued to provide a superb service letting the country know what had happened and providing us with a picture of the effect of the earthquake on the city but also of the devastation that had been wrought on Kaikoura and the hinterland near Culverden in North Canterbury. Kaikoura was cut off by road from both Christchurch and Blenheim due to slips. The railway line was cut similarly. The inland route was also a write off.
The Defence Force slipped into gear, and it was interesting being in that organisation because they were like pigs in muck. This is the stuff they are trained to do and so they were mobilised and ready to go very quickly. Helicopters were dispatched and ships including the HMNZS Caterbury the untility ship set sail for Kaikoura.
I was really tired having had a broken sleep so I was pleased that work had been shut for the day. So I wandered around not sure what to do with myself. I think I read, finished off my blog on The Gong and talked with people.
Remarkably the airport was unaffected and flights took off from early morning. Other parts of the city had been relatively unaffected as well.
Rain had been forecast and sure enough it arrived as a storm late Monday afternoon and for the next 24 hours we were lashed by rain. Fortunately I had enough work to do over that day and got in full days work. It was good not to have to go to work in it. By midafternoon on Tuesday I was suffering from cabin fever so went for a walk up to Kelburn Village and had a coffee. Then I went back and did some more work before going to the gym for some exercise.
By that stage it became apparent that there was some significant damage to Defence House and that we were not going back there for some time. The rains had caused severe flooding in the Hutt Valley and on the Kapiti Coast with roads closed and lots of slips.
The newspapers have full of sensational headlines which keep talking about fearful Wellington residents. Most of the people I know have just got on with life. Most of us don't like severe earthquakes, but they happen and there is not much you can do about them. We live on a plate boundary and one thing most of us can be certain of is that a natural disaster such as a major earthquake might happen in our lifetimes. For some like my 89 year old she has been alive for both the Napier and now the Kaikoura earthquakes.
Over the week more buildings have been found at risk. It appears that those that were tall and on soft ground came off worst.
Bev commented that from what she was reading it seemed like Wellington was a disaster area. Yes a bit of damage is being uncovered in Wellington but it is not a disaster area. Some people aren’t reacting too well but most people I have talked with wish the media would stop saying that the Wellington is living on fear. There are some nervous people and I know some who are fearful but it is like being scared of water and people learn to live with it. The control freaks are probably more bothered than people like me who see it as mother nature doing her thing in the same ways storms devastate Australia or the firestorms that take out whole communities. It is just with some of those events you have more warnings.
I heard a person say on radio Friday morning that the city and its buildings had done what was meant to be done and that was keep people safe and if they did that but were now unsafe then they had done their job; people got out alive. One of the things that has happened is that where there is reclaimed land and there are big buildings on them then they have suffered the most. Those buildings which were on hard rock seemed to have performed well including buildings that were deemed to be more at risk. As one engineer said the modern buildings performed well and that people would have got out alive. While the earthquake was centred near Kaikoura and that is the community that has suffered most – only one person lost their life. This is one of the biggest earthquakes in NZ in the last 100 years so it is an unusual one. Also, apparently we have had a fairly dormant time recently with few major earthquakes. Most people have not felt anything like this earthquake. I was in Nelson when the Inangahua earthquake struck and that one moved us around similarly but in a straight line it was much closer to Nelson than the Culverden one was to Wellington.
In a testament to resilience I heard on radio another guy who was very laconic about what had happened. He was outside his trashed house cooking on bricks he had used to build an oven and just saw it as something that happened and you kept on living.
So, I think of it as an event that makes life interesting. Boring is not as good as it is made out to be!!
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