Thanks for sharing your experiences. Sounds like you've been triple whacked by earthquakes.
If you have time, here's some questions I'm curious about. Talking to somebody living there being more informative than watching the news.
Is there insurance or government protection from the banks for mortgages in an event like this? Given that an entire city probably can't make its mortgage payment, let alone what they were paying for has been damaged/destroyed.
If folks are leaving, where are they going? To another city? Island? Country?
Is everyone pretty civil and helpful, or is it pretty dangerous to be in the city?
Is there enough food, water, supplies for folks over there?
Was the whole country affected this badly, or just your city mainly?
I don't mind questions - the whole point of this thread for me is that it is somewhere to vent.
Normal insurance cover doesn't cover if you lose your job because of the earthquake. However the government has set up a special benefit for people who can't live in their house but still have to pay their mortgage. This benefit helps with the cost of renting another house. They are also setting up a heap of temporary housing in the local parks that aren't in damaged areas. The normal replacement insurance situation applies for damaged houses (except New Zealand has a special government fund that covers the first $100,000 of damage - this was set up in the 1930's so has lots of money in it now). However the extent of damage is so great that it is taking many many months to even get the insurance companies to do an inspection. And then there are the areas where the house is not totally destroyed but the government is going to order that the land must be abandoned. They are trying to work out with the insurance companies how that will be paid for, but have made the committment that anyone who loses their house will get the value of it pre-earthquakes.
Folks are going everywhere. Most are staying within New Zealand of course, but as Christchurch is the third biggest city (approx 400,000 people) in New Zealand it has put pressure on every other place - particularly the smaller towns near Christchurch which have had massive and sudden increases in population that they don't quite have the infrastructure to cope with.
This has become an incredibly patient, supportive and helpful wee society with everyone looking out for everyone else. We all feel like refugees in our own town and it gives us all something in common. When someone asks 'how are you?' they are honestly wnating to know now. There is still a criminal element of course, but I think that in terms of people, Christchurch is safer than it has ever been.
People think that in a major disaster anarchy will ensue - nothing could be further from the truth. In a disaster people generally care more for each other, share more, get to know other people more and act more civilised. However you also need to keep in mind that we are in a city where every single person is tired and traumatised so we have to be gentle with each other and all we can really do is just keep going. We are also constantly anxious because there are constant aftershocks and every time the ground shakes you have a small moment of worry when you assess whether it will be another big quake or not.
My office is now in an industrial area and trucks constantly rattle the building - not good for the nerves.
No problems with food and supplies now - we have our emergency systems well organised after 9 months of this. However water and sewerage remain a big problem as so many pipes are broken and keep on getting broken with the aftershocks, and power is still a bit intermittant. It's winter here and quite a few people without power are being admitted to hospital with hypothermia. Most of the east side of town now has portaloos on every corner (do you call them portajohns?). A lot of the town is back to fetching water from tankers and everyone who can get water through their taps has to boil it before using it. At work today we lost power for about half an hour, and then the water for a couple of hours - so you really can't take anything for granted.
A whole heap of people have mud, silt and sewerage flowing through their houses again which is just foul.
Nowhere else in the country is affected by the earthquake directly at all. On a world scale these quakes aren't huge - it's just the fact that they are directly under the city. That coupled with the makeup of the ground under the city has given us something called the trampoline effect. You know when you are jumping on a trampoline with someone and then they suddenly jump out of sequence and you crash down hard - that's what it is like. We've been told that in terms of cities we have taken more force than any other city ever. The only reason that more damage wasn't done is because we are quite careful about earthquake codes. However the force we took was 180% of what modern earthquake codes allow for. The ground force acceleration was 4 times what Japan recently had in it's 9.0 earthquake despite ours only being a 6.3 on the ricterscale. Apparantly after Monday's big quakes most of the buildings in the central city are on a lean and another couple of hundred need immediate demolition.
Radio New Zealand : News : Christchurch Earthquake : Scientists say trampoline effect worsened quake
Personally I'm feeling a bit better now that I know I have options - I've designed new ways of doing things over the last 4 months here with the type of work that I do, and I did a bit of asking some of my contacts around the country if they'd be interested in me setting up my methods in their regions. They are very interested so if we feel we need to escape I should be able to sort it for our family.
Phew, that's about the biggest post I've ever written on the old interwebs.
