Keep Calm and Carry On

This old World War Two British motto has become a catchword for life after the earthquake (AE). It does seem to characterise how we are managing. Work goes on - currently people are painting my roof. My workplace is uninhabitable so we are camping in a crowded office in the suburbs. We have now had over 500 aftershocks and i sleep through most of the night ones. We can probably guess magnitude as the aftershocks happen - hmm, i would say that one was about 4.7.

i think i would handle it differently if i had had a terrible experience. If i had major damage to my house, or a narrow escape, or had toddlers who were frightened, i may be taumatised. One teenage girl is still managing her mother who continues to panic after each aftershock. One man struggled through the broken glass as the earth rocked, carrying his tddler under one arm and trying to get to the baby crying in his cot. His wife was away, in Wellington, and he feared that she had been in an even bigger earthquake, because Wellington is earthquake prone. Fearing her dead, he managed his panicking toddler until she could return. Some people are still without sewerage and using public port-a-loos. A hospital security guard is trying to carry on at work while struggling with his own constant panic. Lots of people are just plain over it.

The state of emergency was lifted today. There is still a very small cordon around some of the CBD. One of the most poignant sights for me was driving past the Peaches and Cream Adult Superstore at night. The building was cordoned off.and clearly damanged. A mannequin wearing pink bunny ears and a fluffy pink negligee still posed in the broken window, the little cute pink skirt fluttering sadly in the night breeze.

We now have celebrity geologists. The best website is Christchurch Quake Map which has excellent graphics showing the Big One and all the subsequent aftershocks with magnitude, depth and time. i look at it daily.

Everyone has an earthquake story. i like this one:

Ollie age 6 was looking forward to returning to school because he had News! Liam age 8 says to him, witheringly, 'It's not the eathquake, is it, because everybody's got that one'. No, says Ollie, patently lying, it is the Brick, the souvenir brick he took from the fallen chimney. When you are 6 your world is quite small, and the earthquake was special because it happened to you. When you are 8 your world is bigger, and you also get to be scathing.

i think Christchurch will never get back to normal in the sense of BE (before earthqauke). It's a bit like having a baby - you do get back to normal but it is a different normal and it is years after the birth.