Early this morning I woke up to swaying from a 7.1 earthquake off the coast of Japan.
Then I went back to sleep.
Tag Archives: earthquake
Te Papa
I’m at Te Papa Tongarewa. I really need to rethink the size of the camera I schlep around.
This is a big museum. There are Maori boats and houses, interactive earthquake displays, Captain Cook’s cannon, videos of Roger Muldoon, and a Sheep Cam.
Phar Lap’s skeleton is here, but his hide is in Melbourne.
There’s a moa, too, but it’s fake. I will not be fooled!
And trolls.
Quake City
Sure it was horrific, but that’s no reason not to make a tourist attraction out of it.
Red Zone
I took a tour of the Red Zone today. That’s the part of the downtown area that’s still cordoned off. It’s like touring a war zone or a scene from some post-apocalypse movie where everyone’s vanished. The city and the owners are deciding which buildings can be saved, which have to be destroyed, and how to demolish buildings safely. (A few days ago they found asbestos in one of the bank buildings.) Some buildings have concrete-filled shipping containers in front of them to keep them from falling over.
One problem is liquefaction. The whole area is an alluvial plain. During an earthquake (and during each of the hundreds of aftershocks), liquefied ooze shoots to the surface, causing foundations to shift and generally wreaking havoc. Some buildings that were found to be stable after the main earthquakes had to be demolished after smaller aftershocks made them unsalvageable.
I had to sign an assortment of waivers to take this tour, and they gave us a safety briefing on the bus full of dire warnings, then offered people a chance to leave. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t any more risky than walking around next to damaged buildings outside the Red Zone.
Britishness
My guidebooks all describe Christchurch as “the most British of New Zealand cities.” They show pictures of the downtown area that look like this:
The downtown currently looks more like this:
Parts of it are reconstructed, but it’s a big job and they have a long way to go. Part of the reason may be that the government, like governments everywhere, has Grand Plans. They’re going to put in a stadium and a sports center and a performing arts precinct and a new library and several other things that I’ve forgotten. I’d wager that they don’t have the money to do any of it. So the downtown is still in rubble.
That aside, what the guidebooks don’t tell you is that the rest of the city looks more like Los Angeles than Cambridge. They even have agapanthus everywhere.
The only thing that’s British about it is that they drive on the left. The rest looks pretty American.