After the quake

These are try­ing and chaot­ic times, but I hope every­one’s hanging in there. Social media means that there’s more inform­a­tion avail­able than ever before, but also that there’s a lot of mis­in­form­a­tion and con­fu­sion, so we thought we’d put up a quick post to help you find the most offi­cial sources.

Civil Defence’s WREMO page and their WREMO twit­ter feed are the best places for core emer­gency inform­a­tion across the region. For Wel­ling­ton City, the WCC’s twit­ter account is good for updates, while their city out­ages and clos­ures page is the best way to get a sum­mary. They link to NZTA and Trans­port for Wel­ling­ton for road clos­ures, but they also cov­er ped­es­tri­an cor­dons that neither of those vehicle-cent­ric sites do. Unfor­tu­nately, I haven’t found any up-to-date offi­cial over­view of build­ing clos­ures: the WCC pages just says “check with the land­lord, own­er or your employ­er” which isn’t always help­ful, and the situ­ation is chan­ging so rap­idly that media sources such as Stuff and Scoop are often out of date. Every­one knows how hard the crim­in­ally under­fun­ded GeoN­et have been work­ing, and for rap­id loc­al quake data I often find myself look­ing dir­ectly at the seis­mo­graph drum page: it’s the quick­est way to tell wheth­er that shak­ing you just felt was an after­shock, wind gust, or just your frazzled nerves.

For broad­er cov­er­age, RNZ has done a stel­lar job, both over the air­waves and on their RNZ live quake page. Stuff has also had some use­ful art­icles, and the Stuff live blog was par­tic­u­larly help­ful dur­ing Tues­day’s floods. Their twit­ter account was­n’t so great, though. When train ser­vices were briefly hal­ted on Tues­day, they tweeted about that, but included a pic­ture of warped rail­way lines that an eagle-eyed Twit­ter user recog­nised as a recent image from near Blen­heim. This sent the mis­lead­ing mes­sage that there was actu­al dam­age to the Wel­ling­ton lines, when in fact it was just pre­cau­tion­ary. Trains were back run­ning less than an hour later, but Stuff did­n’t issue a timely update, which could have left oth­ers misled.

One thing that has aston­ished me was that any­one who exper­i­enced Monday morn­ing’s quake in Wel­ling­ton could be sur­prised that some build­ings were dam­aged. It was a Bloody Big Quake by any stand­ards, and though it was some dis­tance away, the Wel­ling­ton ground shak­ing was sim­il­ar to that of the 2013 Sed­don quakes and it las­ted for a hor­ri­fy­ing 90 seconds. Engin­eers have poin­ted out that the spec­trum of the shak­ing this time had a great­er effect on mid-rise build­ings, so build­ings that were undam­aged in 2013 suffered more stress this time.

But we already have an army of arm­chair engin­eers express­ing dis­be­lief at the extent of the dam­age, des­pite the fact that in Wel­ling­ton noth­ing col­lapsed in the quake and no-one was (as far as I know) ser­i­ously injured. Per­haps there needs to be bet­ter edu­ca­tion about the build­ing code, which does­n’t require build­ings to remain unscathed, just that they stand up for long enough for people to escape. Non-struc­tur­al ele­ments can fail, pipes can burst, exter­i­or details can fall, and the build­ing may be unin­hab­it­able for months or even have to be demol­ished, and it would still meet the require­ments of the code as long as there was­n’t cata­stroph­ic struc­tur­al fail­ure. Eye of the Fish has some informed, meas­ured dis­cus­sion about the Stats and ICI build­ings, and a rather more pas­sion­ate rejoin­der to calls for a red zone. [Update: this Her­ald art­icle by a pro­fess­or of civil engin­eer­ing is the best explan­a­tion I’ve seen so far of what build­ings are expec­ted to do in an earth­quake.]

The time for ana­lys­is will come soon, and indeed there will have to be some tough ques­tions asked about spe­cif­ic build­ings and about wheth­er the code itself is adequate. As much as I’m happy to blame the gov­ern­ment for almost everything, I think that with a few pos­sible excep­tions, the blame for the dam­age can be put down to only one cause: a Bloody Big Quake. Wheth­er you blame that on plate tec­ton­ics, Rūaumoko, the super­moon, drilling ships or extra-sexu­al beha­viour is up to you (though you might like to donate to Rain­bow Youth and send a receipt to Bri­an Tamaki). In the mean­time, all we can do is remain cau­tious but calm, real­ise that many build­ing clos­ures are brief and sens­ibly pre­cau­tion­ary rather than a cause for imme­di­ate pan­ic, and look after ourselves and our loved ones.