Earthquake survival stuff -what worked? What didn't? The first few days....

Christchurch where I live has been subjected to 4 "significant" earthquakes and countless minor aftershocks since September 4th.

The first and largest happened at 4.36AM local time, doing extensive damage to buildings and contents, but resulted in no casualties. It was a 7.1 magnitude.

We had a 4.9 afertshock on boxing day, again property damage but no fatalities.

Myself and many others had started to fall for a comfortable but dangerous line of reasoning, that goes "well, we, and our house survived the main shock, everything else is going to be of a lesser order of magnitude, so things can start getting back to normal". I guess this rationalisation was part of putting the whole thing behind you, and starting to think about tomorrow....

So, on to 22nd feb and the 6.3 and following aftershocks, and the tragic loss of many lives and the destruction of large parts of the city.

First lesson for all of us, of course, that an earthquakes impact is really derived from Magnitude times Distance. A close 6.3 did vastly more damage than a 7.1 that was 30 odd K's away.

Our Christchurch based family lives in six different suburbs spread across the region. With each quake, houses experienced different levels of damage.

When the first quake hit we were relatively poorly prepared to respond to the immediate situation. It was dark, there was broken glass all over the floor.

Observation:
We had torches and candles, but they were in the laundry, down the other end of the house. All of the contents of the shelves in the laundry got dumped on the floor, broken glass, spilled cleaners and solvents, detergents plus the torches and the candles.
Lesson:
Have a hand cranked torch beside your bed

Observation:
Immediately after the first shock, we lost power and water. Power was out for about 12 hours. Outage was caused by substations tripping, not destruction of delivery infrastructure. Water was out for three days. Cellular phone network was taken out by power disruptions plus it's own infrastructure issues.
Lessons:
In that first day someone was able to physically visit all of our immediate family members & check that they were OK (& they were, fortunately). We have the usual cordless phones all round the house, none of which work without power. So it is a good idea to ensure that you have at least one old "plug into the wall" type phone. Because the power was out, none of our radios worked in the house. (Car radio did, so we did have a way of checking the news). We exchanged wind up torch / radios for Christmas & dutifully kept them in the bedside table and they were a godsend in February. The whole thing is very isolating, the imporance of a radio to us cannot be overstated. Just knowing generally what is going on is incredibly important in this situation.

Observation:
Each person needs about a litre of water a day to drink (kids probably need twice that). In September we did not have any reserved emergency supplies. After September, we gradually started stockpiling supplies of water.
Lessons:
I was storing our water supplies in our garage. The garage with the remotely operated electric door...  I had put the emergency release key away for safe keeping, and after about two hours of sifting through (more) broken glass, china etc I found the key and was able to open the garage door. I had been stacking the bottles on available shelving. Next time I will place them on the bottom shelf, so when they get shaken off the shelf, some of them wont split. Also, this time, it took me a couple of hours to clear debris away from the cars so I could get them out of the garage. 

After the February quake, we were without water for nearly a week. Some areas 2-3 weeks. Hygene starts to become an issue. The sewerage system had also been damaged, meaning that toilets cannot be flushed, and our rivers were quickly contaminated & unsafe to use for anything.

Observations:
Like most people, we dug a long drop toilet in the garden

Lessons:
We used a 500ml plastic pump of hand sanitiser every day between four adults and two kids.
A long handled shovel is very useful for digging your long drop.
Buy a couple of cheap plastic solar showers, nothing beats a shower after a couple of days of sifting through rubble etc.

Observation:
You need a water source for things like washing dishes & clothes, showering or washing.  It took about four or five days for emergency supplies to start trickling into Christchurch. 
Lessons
We used a couple of plastic garbage bins to store our emergency stuff in. These were able to be connected to downpipes from our guttering catching rainwater. You also need to have some containers for collecting water from distribution points. Ideally 2-10 litre size, the big 25 litres and above are too hard to carry around. We are now stockpiling empty 2 litre bottles in our roof cavity and under the floor.

Observation:
Some areas of Christchurch were declared "no-go" for anyone (the CBD sill, 3 weeks later). There is no way of knowing in advance which areas will become inaccessible. The bridge to my wife's parents house was out for a couple of days and they had no way of getting back to thier place.
Lesson:
Keep a few days supplies of any critical medications at another location (another family members house etc).

Observation:
Post September, I dutifully sat down and backed up everything on the hard drive of my desktop, but left the backup in the same room as my PC. Yes, dumb and obvious, I know.
Lesson:
A small amount of thought, planning and organisation can see you arrange a low or no cost off site storage foe your important data (digital photos, tax records, all sorts of stuff that you save on your c drive)

Observation:
Post September, we agreed a grab and go list in case we had to get our really fast, which worked when we relocated to our daughter's house.
Lesson:
Several people we know were given 5 minutes to get out of their house, no questions, no discussion. You really need to put some thought into making this list and then prioritising it. The kinds of things people are still kicking themselves for not getting:

Contact lists
Paper diaries
Insurance documents
Banking details
Tax records

This is as well as the obious stuff like money, passports, personal documents, photos etc.

Observation:
After the first quake, afershocks (some big) are inevitable. Knowing this, there were several things I could have done to reduce the damage done by the aftershocks.

Lesson:
After the first quake, go round and screw every cupboard/ shelving unit / wine rack to the wall. This won't stop things getting shaken off shelves, but it might stop the whole unit falling over, as most of ours did in September.
Anything that you really value, start storing it in the most secure way you can. For example, I started storing my guitars in their cases, not on stands. Pack away the one or two precious artifacts that you really love in the strongest containers you can find. We had much more damage to our contents from aftershocks.

Observation:
Now is the time to sit down and really read your home and contents insurance policies, not after the event!
Lesson:
If you have insurance, make sure it's paid up. Our was, thanks Jill!
There are lots of subtleties..Do you have temporary accomodation cover? Do you have your assets properly documented and photographed (and all this stored off site?).  

Observation:
Panel TVs are much more prone to tipping over, with fatal consequences for at least one child in Christchurch.
Lesson:
Use the restraining straps the manufacturer supplied - no one ever does.

Observation:
This is purely anecdotal, but here, after every big event, a second (and sometimes 3rd) shock followed within the first hour. These ripple effects actually did the really visible damage. Presumably the first shock weakens or breaks the structure, and the following shakes knock it over.
Lesson:
We were in and out of our house in a mild panic, checking on neighbours, making phone calls and so on in the first hour after the latest shock. I was on the phone trying to ring my parents in Australia to let them know that we were OK when the first big aftershock hit. I dropped the phone and ran, and bricks from the chimney followed me out of the room.  Stay out of the house for the first hour! The only person I knew personally who was killed was helping someone when that second shock arrived.

This is not really first few days stuff, but worth mentioning anyway.

Brick Chimneys are bad news in an earthquake. Ours came down on the roof in September then collapsed to ground level in Februrary.
Tile roofs shed tiles in earthquakes. Falling missiles as you are running outside in a panic.  The leak afterwards. They weigh about 8-10 ton, whereas an tin roof the same size weighs about 1-2 tons. Most of the houses in our area that are badly damaged have tile roofs, not tin.
Get a plumber with a camera to check out your sewer pipes, damage may not show for months / years.


I will add to this list of lessons and observations as they come back to me. Obviously, they are of no use whatsoever if you were in Japan last week. I don't know what planning you could have done for that. My heart goes out to them.

Just had another good aftershock. Next post will be on the realities of week 2 and on......

Welcome to Instapundit readers!

Christchurch before and after

Old ANZ before

Old ANZ after

Charlie B's Backpackers

Charlie B's after

Catherdral before

Catherdral after

Colombo st South

Colombo st Sth after

CTV before

CTV after

Manchester St

Manchester St After - note grand chancellor in the background

PGG Before

PGG after

Reuben Blades before

After

Also worth noting that all of the before shots were taken after the September quake

TVNZ- incompetence or bias?

The Prime Minister has played down figures showing a 6.8% rise in unemployment, saying that the rate is prone to fluctuations
http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/key-plays-down-unemployment-rise-4012047

Source? TVNZ News..Journalist???  Who knows 

Lets give them the benefit of the doubt, and just point out its "Showing a rise to 6.8%"

Sigh

Favourite places #1

For 20 odd years, a bunch of guys and their kids would go away camping, at different places all across Victoria.


We would to hunt out remote spots where we could make a bit of noise and not be disturbing (or disturbed by) other campers.


It was fascinating watching these kids grow up over many years, and I know it was a highpoint for many of them - a whole extended weekend of dad to themselves.


The pretext was going fishing. Surf fishing, river fishing, or here, lake fishing.


This annual ritual is still going strong, although I am now not able to go, living as I do in another country (New Zealand). In a year or two, the first grandkids will be old enough to go along.


This shot was taken at Lake Tyers, in eastern Victoria, not far from the mouth of the snowy river. Lake Tyers is a landlocked salt lake. Because it is quite remote, the fish stocks are quite plentiful and diverse. It is one of those spots that you never know what you are going to pull up.

Taken from our campsite late in the afternoon, as a front was coming through.


Beautiful spot, where we could go for days and not see another person.

Needs it we does...

I was walking down Manchester St in Christchurch one day last year and this was parked on the side of the road.

It just ticked all the boxes for me -Turbo, great colour combination, G50 gearbox, in immaculate condition, I just loved everything about it.

About two weeks later, it turned up on trade me for $75k, which I thought was extremely reasonable.


Talk about a twitching cheque book hand.

Tried for weeks to rationalise the purchase of this car, but could not bring myself to pull the trigger, or even go and look at it, as that would surely have been the end.

I still want it..........

One true sentence

Many years ago I read in a book by Ernest Hemingway (Death in the afternoon?) that they key to sitting down at the typewriter (remember them?) and loading a blank sheet of paper is to start with one true sentence, and that the piece would flow from there.


I have followed that advice many many times, writing complex business correspondence and presentations, drafting letters of condolence and all sorts of other occasions when one has to frame up an argument. It really has helped.


Lets see how regularly I stick to the discipline.

Stardate 1012011

Greetings and welcome!

I will admit to three motivators (four if you include vanity) that have caused this blog to come into existence.

Firstly, I was keen to slightly address the imbalance of political opinion in the people's republic of New Zealand, second, I have greatly enjoyed regularly reading a number of other people's efforts over the years, and have finally decided that both the time and motivation are here for me to push my own little boat out onto the sea of published opinion.

Lastly, being a self confessed capitalist, I am curious to see if I can "monetize" this foray into new media.

My initial hypothesis is that above all else, readership is king. Presumably they key to readership is a combination of relevance, interest and a diet of regular new content. Out of curiosity I will post stats on readership and revenue (if any) on a regular basis.

Suggestions and guidance on how to advance those objectives will of course be greatly appreciated.

I also hope to have a bit of fun a generate screams of outrage from various lefties, greenies and other numpties, so bring it on, folks.

Enjoy!