Earthquakes

The earthquake

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Kim and I were sitting at our purple lunch table. George, one of Synapsys’ contractors, wandered over and sat down with us. We hadn’t seen him for a while, so we were catching up. The room started to rattle, but it took us a moment to react – we’ve had so many aftershocks now they don’t really bother me. This one was different.

As the intensity increased, Kim and George slid under the table and I jumped up and braced myself in a nearby doorframe. I could see James skating around the kitchen, he was shouting something but I couldn’t hear him over the noise.

I could hear Phil shouting too, but didn’t know what he was saying either. I kept my head down, feet firmly planted and held on. It was over in about 20 seconds, and I can quite honestly say that it was the slowest 20 seconds of my life. As the shaking stopped, Phil’s shouting became comprehensible:
“GET OUT NOW” … “GET AWAY FROM THE WALL” … “DON’T STOP TO GET ANYTHING JUST GET OUT”.

I ignored him for a moment to make my way over to Kirsty’s desk. I couldn’t see her and I didn’t know she had gone out for lunch a few minutes earlier. Once I could see she wasn’t there, I grabbed my phone and ran. We got out and down and away. Phil was last out, checking that everyone exited safely. We stood together in a huddle in the middle of the street, with all the other people who streamed out.

The image I come back to in my mind over and over is looking up and around and seeing the fallen buildings. It was hard to comprehend. There were people in those buildings. What happened to them? Did they get out? Kirsty did. She picked her way through the rubble to join us.

Then my thoughts turned to making contact. I called Stephen and got through after several tries. “Hallo, that was a big one!” he said. Bit of an understatement I thought. But I knew at least that it was centred in town – it hadn’t resonated from out his way. I could tick off Grace, Arlia, Antony and Wyatt as safe then. My next thought was Megan. She could be anywhere. And yet, just as I considered this, she walked out of the rubble towards me. She had been waiting for a bus in the centre of the city. I’ve never been so happy to see her.

There is more, but I won’t write about it now – getting out of the city, the long walk home, the aftermath. Maybe later.

The one where we take a breath

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It’s 4:30am and I can’t sleep. I’m in Tekapo. I’m awake because my brain is worried about my family back in Christchurch and must have decided to wake me up so I can keep it company. On September 4th last year, I was woken up at 4:35am by a slow rolling earthquake. I was in Tekapo then too, and assumed it was the result of some movement in the Alpine Fault. It didn’t feel like much, so I went back to sleep.

Last Tuesday it really felt like we were getting back on track from that earthquake. We had a staff meeting in the morning where we talk positively about new projects and moving forward after some hard months. I mentioned that I might be a bit more stressed than usual with the wedding coming up the following Tuesday. I’d love to go back to the purple lunch table and be that stressed again.

I’m going to recount the past week’s activities in bits. There is the bit about the earthquake, the bit about the wedding, and the bit about the house. Stay tuned.

In with the new!

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Just because our lives weren’t quite busy enough (the wedding is in TWO weeks), Stephen and I recently kicked off the process of buying a house. So last week the bank gave us a pre-approved home loan. We have a licence to hunt.

It’s a difficult time to be buying a house – there is uncertainty about the structural integrity of a lot of homes in Christchurch right now, and nowhere more so than the area we are hunting (Avonside/Dallington).

It is sad to drive around the area, seeing the busted-up streets and houses. But now we have new things to consider. Do we want to live in this street? Will it need complete repaving? Is there underlying liquefaction? Do we want to take all that on?

Luckily we are in no danger of inadvertently buying a house with structural damage that gives us problems later. All homes purchased in Canterbury require a structural engineering report. If there is damage, we can’t buy it. Pretty straightforward (for us anyway).

You might wonder why we are choosing to jump into the market right now, rather than wait until things settle. There are still a lot of unknowns about where the housing market is going in Canterbury, but the sector is forecast to boom once rebuilding gets underway in 2012-2013. We are hoping to jump on the home-ownership train before this happens. So exciting times for us!

What a week!

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This post is mostly for future-me to reminisce, feel free to skip over it if you’ve heard it already!

So last Friday afternoon, Stephen and I headed off for a fun adventure to Lake Tekapo. We were going to participate in the 8th annual Southern Cross Ice Hockey Tournament – a fun weekend designed to wrap up the women’s hockey season.

Bebe in action

And as my Christchurch compatriots well know, things did not go entirely as planned. We were shaken awake at 4:40am by what seemed like a fairly big earthquake. And unlike my fellow Christchurchians, we went back to sleep without giving it another thought. I was next awoken about an hour later as people started texting to see if we were alright. Other than being woken up in the middle of the night twice (!), we were fine, of course. But that was my first inkling that something was wrong. I jumped on the iPad and dialed up the New Zealand Herald website. Nothing there. Then I tried Twitter. It was going OFF. There had been a major earthquake in Christchurch.

I spent the next couple of hours playing hockey (in the early morning light, beautiful), worrying, and trying to get hold of all my beloved ones to make sure they were okay. Which they were. Everyone safe and accounted for. Not so my poor city. As it emerged in the days following, Christchurch was badly shaken up. The 7.1M earthquake was shallow, and because parts of the city is build on swamp land or sand, it wobbled like jelly, taking brick buildings and chimneys with it.

So here is the event from my point of view.

It felt surreal. I felt it, but not the terror that many people must have. I was far away, safe, having a fun time. I was also distracted by the fact that Grace’s water had broke and she was waiting patiently to go into labour. Returning to Christchurch on Sunday night I went straight to the hospital where, three hours later, I watched my new granddaughter arrive. It was just beautiful. Soft lights, music, peaceful (other than poor Grace’s yelling). What an amazing thing to experience. Earthquakes were a million miles away.

Meagle, Bronwen, Bebe, Arlia and Wyatt

It wasn’t until I drove home that it started to sink in. No hot water upstairs – the water tank had burst. No clean drinking water until further notice. Luckily for me I cheerily flew off to Wellington the next morning for a two-day meeting. I followed along on Twitter again, but felt removed.

So my first real experiences of the earthquake aftermath were the aftershock I felt on Wednesday morning (sounded and felt HUGE but was only a 4-point-something), and driving through the rubble in the centre of the city on Wednesday afternoon.

So now it’s Sunday, and things are finally starting to feel normal again. The aftershocks seem to have slowed (all-told we’ve had over 400; I felt two of them). The city has reopened and clean-up is underway. It’s sad to drive around and see buildings coming down.

I went for a run around my suburb this morning. We live right by a river and a lake, so there was a lot of silt from the burst banks. The water in the lake and the river had risen sharply with the quake and all the water had spilled out. It seems to be back where it belongs now, but there is a lot of damage as a result. There are huge cracks in the pavement and roads and plenty of evidence of liquefaction (what a weird process that is!).

Liquefaction volcanoes

And port-a-loos everywhere – one every few houses. This was part of the emergency response. A lot of houses were without running water, so the civil defense arranged portable toilets to be placed in the streets for people to use. Clever. Speaking of which, the emergency response was amazing. Most people had power and water restored within hours of the quake, and those that needed their houses assessed had this done within hours or days. People who needed tradespeople were taken care of. It will take a long time to clean up the mess, but I was amazed at just how fast the process was begun.

Sometimes people grumble about taxes and levies, but after an event like this, I can see what I’m paying for. Immediate and comprehensive disaster relief, compensation for lost houses, wages, business. It will cost us billions, but we will be okay. I love my little socialist state.