The day the earth shook - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Ian Lowe
RATHER THAN STANDING in the park doing nothing, we decided to walk towards our friends. James had a small map, so we were able to plot a route around the CBD and avoid the area being cleared of people. Amazingly, at one of the roadblocks we bumped into a cricketer we had encountered on our first day in Christchurch, in his day job as a police officer.
We worked our way through the chaos and had almost reached our destination when we hit a dead end, a street closed even to those on foot. While we were plotting a way around the obstacle, we got new instructions to head back to the western edge of the city, where the Mount Hutt group would be waiting with the team bus. The route back took us past crevasses snaking for a hundred metres along roadways, holes big enough to swallow cars, more collapsed buildings and fallen trees.
About 5 pm, more than four hours after the earthquake, we were finally all together, hugging each other with relief that we were unharmed. By this time my system was suffering badly from delayed shock. Fortunately we were outside one of the few buildings in the city centre that still had running water and the motel owner kindly allowed me to use a toilet.
WE WERE ABLE to escape the city. I was tired, cold and hungry, after walking around the city for four hours. Like the others, I was just wearing what I went out in at lunchtime, but it was a cold and miserable day. Rescue was at hand. The cricketers we were meant to be playing that day arranged for us to go to the Rangiora area, where we were plied with alcohol. I found great comfort in a large malt whisky. We were lent warm clothing and fed a hearty meal by the local farmers and their wives while we watched endless footage of the disaster on TV.
We were billeted in four different houses for the night, then brought back together for a sensational breakfast the next morning before heading into town to buy some essentials: a shirt or two, underwear and socks, toiletries, small backpacks to carry our scant belongings. I also had to buy a watch, since mine had been left behind in the hotel. I had reasoned that I didn't need to know the time while I was having a lunch break.
We must have provided a significant economic stimulus to this small country town. I estimate we spent about $3000 between us, just getting enough gear to survive another day or two. Like most of the others, I had left my passport, camera, keys and clothing as well as my cricket gear in the hotel room. It was destined to remain there until June, as the building was too dangerous to allow people in to recover belongings. It was August, nearly six months after the earthquake, before they reached me. Remarkably, the camera and laptop seemed no worse for the experience - when I powered up the computer, the documents I had been working on were still open - but the watch's condition was terminal. The window of my hotel room had shattered, so everything inside was exposed to the elements for months.
We headed to Christchurch Airport that afternoon to see if we could fly back home. We were in luck. A Pacific Blue flight had a group of twenty who had not turned up, so we were able to buy seats and be rushed onto the plane. Australian immigration authorities agreed to let us back into the country with photo ID and after answering questions from our passport applications. I was grateful for my last-minute decision to take my wallet with me when I went out for lunch, rather than just money. Without my driver's licence I would have been in the same position as the two Dutchmen in our group, who had to fly to Wellington to get emergency travel documents from their embassy.
Back in Australia I had to recreate the work I had done in the hotel room that fateful morning. The report, which would have been finished on the afternoon of 22 February had the earthquake not intruded, took me another week to prepare.
The New Zealand government had disaster plans for two events that were thought possible: a major earthquake hitting Wellington and a volcanic eruption in the Auckland region. They had not foreseen the possibility of a catastrophic earthquake in Christchurch. There had been one in September 2010, which did a lot of damage to the city centre but no serious injuries because it happened at 4.30 on a Sunday morning. The experts did not predict the violent aftershock that rocked the city in February 2011. The CTV building, which collapsed with terrible loss of life, had been assessed as safe after the September earthquake.
Christchurch is now counting the cost: 180 people dead, hundreds injured, about a quarter of the buildings in the CBD destroyed, and as a consequence a city centre that won't function normally until at least the middle of 2012. There are plans to rebuild, but with much more compact buildings to reduce the risk of earthquake damage. The city's two largest hotels were so badly damaged that they cannot be repaired and will need to be carefully demolished to prevent damage to other nearby buildings.
The Honest Trundlers intend to go back in February 2012, for their usual tour, but not to stay in Christchurch - Rangiora is the likely base.
I HAVE REFLECTED on what seems to be an increasing incidence of disasters across the globe. At one level an inevitable consequence of population growth is that more people live in the path of a natural disaster. There have been events as extreme as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami or the 2011 Japanese earthquake in previous centuries, but they affected smaller populations. Better communications systems alert us to catastrophic events in the rest of the world, meaning we are much more aware of disasters as they happen. The technologies we now use pose additional hazards. In the case of the Japanese tsunami, the loss of life and destruction of property by the wall of water were appalling. Even those coastal towns that were prepared with seawalls were swamped by the huge wave. But the nuclear power stations in the coastal zone caused another set of problems. Control systems automatically shut down the power stations when the earthquake struck, but the tsunami swamped them and destroyed the cooling systems. The consequent explosions spread debris over a large area. It has been estimated that the amount of radioactivity released from the crippled Fukushima precinct is comparable to that from the Chernobyl disaster. As a result a significant area of land will be off-limits to humans for decades, perhaps centuries.
Earth scientists are also warning that the tectonic plates are destabilised by extreme events, setting off a chain of consequent disturbances. They see a chain of serious earthquakes around the Pacific Rim, up to and including the category 9 event off Japan that triggered the disastrous tsunami, as all being linked to the 2004 Boxing Day undersea shift. That event also caused a tsunami with even greater loss of life. Nobody suggests that the system has settled down.
At another level some natural disasters like floods, severe bushfires and tropical storms are becoming more likely as a predictable result of climate change. Scientists were warning twenty-five years ago that we would see stronger tropical storms, extended dry periods, heavy rainfall events, extreme heatwaves and so on. Some have suggested that the melting of terrestrial ice has increased the mass of ocean water pressing on the seabed, possibly triggering the recent spate of undersea earthquakes.
The jury is still out on that hypothesis, but there is no doubt that the 2003 Canberra bushfire, Cyclone Yasi and the 2009 Victorian bushfires are what climate scientists were in the 1980s warning us to expect. Those who deny climate change are delaying our response and exposing us to more danger. We still tend to see each disaster as a separate and unpredictable event, rather than joining the dots and reacting to the pattern.
Green Cross Australia, the local arm of the international body founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, has a major project training people to respond better to disasters. This seems a sensible investment in our future, but prevention is always better than cure. We should be trying to slow climate change, rather than preparing for worse disasters.