Twitter has certainly changed how we deal with disaster: why, journalists used to have to write a whole story all by themselves. It’s a good thing the laws of copyright and politeness are suspended for text on web pages, and that everything on the Internet is thus in the public domain, or reporters would actually have to attribute all their quotes. But if only—if only—there were some means of magically creating a link from the unattributed quote to the writer’s original words… perhaps someone can come up with an elegant software fix. Until then, with newspapers suffering the way they are, it’s good to know that writers on deadline can pluck witty concise quotes from an inexhaustible stream to help make their word count.

In line with Marx’s quip about history repeating itself as tragedy and farce, the three-coloured sticker system used on Christchurch buildings has been adopted by my workplace’s photocopier technicians. It’s not clear exactly what will happen if you try to use a red-stickered photocopier. Presumably it’s life-threatening.

Part of the difficulty in talking about the quake was that the Richter scale isn’t linear. Some people realised that 7.0 is ten times as “wobbly” as 6.0, but thought that meant that 6.1 was twice as much as 6.0. Logarithms aren’t intuitive: 6.1 is about 25% more than 6.0, but 6.3 is 100% more. And it doesn’t help that the Richter scale, despite being widely bandied about by the media and even some of the quake-data services, is not really used by geologists, who like to talk about the moment magnitude or the amount of energy released. Poor Arts majors were getting very confused, so with the help of @kevinpurcell I developed a Qualitative Earthquake Scale™.

5: WTF
6: OMG
7: OMFG!
8: OMG OMG OMG OM

It was interesting to notice people’s decreasing sensitivity to aftershocks, and the increasing accuracy of their inner seismometers. In the 19th century, Galton studied the “wisdom of the crowd”; the remarkable accuracy of averaged non-expert estimates, for example in guessing the weight of an ox. Eventually we’ll be able to average the flurry of guesses on Twitter that follow each tremor and use the “crowd seismometer” to get a pretty accurate estimate. It would certainly be faster than waiting for GeoNet.

We’re starting to see debates in the newspaper and online about rebuilding Christchurch. Some property owners are racing in to demolish unwanted heritage buildings, presumably to build a nice profitable McDonalds, but it’s often possible to save something like the Harbour Light theatre, for which everyone who saw its cracked wall predicted doom. What I hope emerges is an actual Vision for the city, a rebuilding programme with a unified, distinctive Christchurch style that will hold up for another 100 years. Now would be the time to get a group of New Urbanist architects to emulate the success of Napier and create durable, sustainable, beautiful buildings that will not embarrass our descendants. So keep Sir Miles Warren far away from it. Perhaps we could disqualify architects whose own houses fell down.

This is all very high-minded, but I confess to being preoccupied with the more mundane question, “What are we going to do with all those bricks?” Fallen chimneys could be certainly converted into brick paths or patios—walking on bricks seems to be the only safe thing you can do with them. Perhaps an annual brick-throwing festival, as they do in Stroud? The best suggestion I’ve heard is building a Quake of 2010 Memorial Barbecue, so everyone can tell earthquake stories as they burn the sausages. The fire next time.

The most awe-inspiring visuals of the quake for me were the flyover photographs of the fault line near Burnham (well described by Mark Quigley’s home page—start a blog, Mark!). The 3 m slippage showed up as a dent in fences and a kink in shelterbelts; a line of mature trees would suddenly shuffle over, and continue as before but displaced. Long after all the other visible evidence of the earthquake is repaired, these offset trees will remain. If I were a farmer, I’d be putting my location on Google Earth and a donation box on my gate, so the rubberneckers can help fix my fences.

A review of several earthquake simulators:
★★★☆☆: Turbulence on the flight to Wellington
★★★☆☆: Earthquake Room in Te Papa
★★★★☆: Bumpy touchdown at Christchurch Airport

There were of course no shortage of crazy theories about the origin of the quake, which Matthew Dentith has been cataloguing in his conspiracy-theory blog; my favourite is that “perpendicular gravitational waves”, caused by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, travelled right through the Earth to cause mischief. There’s also the persistant idea that divine intervention of some kind protected the good people of Christchurch (while at the same time not preventing the actual quake itself of course). Perhaps Bob Parker was praying too hard for an election campaign miracle? Or did he engineer the quake in the first place?) The most convincing theological statement, though, seems to be the one made by my bookshelf when it fell:

SATURDAY

Kim Hill is telling us to sprinkle vacuum cleaner dust over our poo. In a morning full of surreal experiences, this somehow takes the cake. Friends tell me they’re peeing in buckets, or digging latrines in the yard. This being Christchurch, talk turns to fertilising lemon trees.

Our city’s message to the world is a stoic, “Thanks, but we’ll cope.” A surprising number of businesses open as best they can, before realising we’ve technically had a natural disaster and you’re supposed to be traumatised. It’s the spirit of the Blitz, except the weather is lovely and sunny, and John Key has all the gravitas of Churchill’s stunt double.

SUNDAY

My seismometer is a small plastic Big Bird, which reliably topples over on about a 5.2. I’ve had to stand him up a couple of times today. He’s calibrated against readings from the New Zealand Earthquake Bot, which tweets details of each aftershock (it has three times as many followers as the Christchurch Press). Because the Bot takes ten minutes to report, people have been playing the guess-the-magnitude game on Twitter. They tend to overestimate.

Advanced seismic activity detection technology

Some people are completely freaked out. Some are just angry, and loudly rain curses on the aftershocks—I don’t tell them these will go on for weeks. Some, like me, are sleeping through everything but a 5.0. Everybody’s waiting for the 6.0, which like Godot is supposed to be coming, if not today, then definitely tomorrow. We’re oscillating like Vladimir and Estragon between boredom and despair.

MONDAY

I visited the earthquake shelter at Burnside High, hearing that they might need water containers. Exhausted volunteers have been deluged with donations and are well-supplied with bedding, food, and everything else. Someone donated a game of Twister, especially challenging in an earthquake. Donated books include The Da Vinci Code (a perfect opportunity to get rid of one’s copy, I suspect), and Angela’s Ashes, in case evacuees need reminding things could be worse.

Good news! Eva Longoria, from the Television, is praying for us. All I can think is that it’s a bit late: Eva, if only you had used your celebrity powers and intervened with God before He smote us with His wobbly wrath. Perhaps God only works the cleanup crew.

Huge diffuse disasters are hard to take in, but little ones hit home. Canterbury Cheesemongers—the best cheese shop in Christchurch—may have to be demolished, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This, curiously, affects me more than damage to historic homesteads or friends’ houses: a bit of the Christchurch I know is going away, as will many other bits, all special to somebody.

TUESDAY

More aftershocks. The Burnside High shelter has been hit hard, and it’s been evacuated of its evacuees. I spontaneously decide to spend the night out of town. Kaikoura is supposed to be quite tolerable at this time of year. Heading North through Woodend, the only things damaged seem to be the churches.

WEDNESDAY

Frustration with the aftershocks is boiling up. Two different people told me this morning’s 5.1 caught them on the loo, which rather ruins your equilibrium for the day. Megan comes up with a potential rallying chant for an organised anti-earthquake protest:

We wake!
We shake!
We don’t want any more quakes!

I’m helping my friend pack up her house for evacuation: cracks in the cinderblock walls, the laundry turned into a water feature by a broken pipe, and a hole I can see the outside through. That could be handy for summer ventilation, I suggest. She is not swayed. We both join the Facebook group to save Canterbury Cheesemongers, knowing it probably won’t help.

Somebody comments in my blog that the lack of fatalities reveals divine intervention. Presumably God didn’t like Haiti as much as Christchurch. Perhaps it’s our pious name. Wellington, there’s still time to rename yourself: forget Wellywood, go with something more devotional. Suggestions in the comments.

Twitter has been an indispensable information source, but it’s also fertile ground for rumours. Within a few hours of the quake, there were fake damage photos and denunciation of the fakes. Now the fuel storage tanks at Lyttelton are supposedly on fire, and there’s a petrol shortage, both also quashed before they’re too widely retweeted. The best news for a while is that we can drink the water again: tweeted within half an hour of the press release. I’ve been brushing my teeth from a mug for days, and am happy to dump the stockpot of boiled water sitting in the laundry tub. It feels like I’m flushing away the unreality of the last few days. Now to see what reality has in store.

[Also posted, essentially as above, on the NZ Herald website, www.nzherald.co.nz, 9 Sept 2010.]

Thirteen things I learned from an earthquake:

1. The Southern sky is a beautiful thing, especially on a cloudless night. We forget this when we live in cities, until the electricity is suddenly cut off and you see the stars again. You see them especially well at half-past four in the morning, standing shivering in your driveway hoping the shaking doesn’t start again. Oh look, Orion.

2. We don’t have many uncontrolled four-way intersections in Christchurch, so our road etiquette gets a bit rusty. This is particularly noticeable when the traffic lights all stop working. Roundabouts then come into their own, as fabulous earthquake-proof solutions; far safer than relying on politeness and common sense.

3. While waiting for the power to come back on, I took a stroll around the Styx Mill Reserve. I don’t think the ducks noticed there had been a natural disaster. A few boulders fell off Castle Rock, but otherwise the earthquake’s effect was only on things we’d built, often badly. Unlike floods, hurricanes, or volcanoes, the damage from earthquakes is a collaboration between humans and nature.

4. You imagine buildings reduced to rubble, but so far these are just pictures on the news. Nothing’s fallen down in my suburb. The real damage is cracked roads, flooding from ruptured water mains, the creepy threat of contaminated drinking water, and fire breaking out where gas lines have broken.

5. Always secure your bookcases to a wall.

   

   Cunning strategy for securing bookcase against aftershock

6. Those abstract emergency-kit lists suddenly become very concrete. My wishlist: a flashlight right beside the bed candles and matches in the kitchen drawer some way to charge the iPhone: a car charger and a solar panel would both have been useful a car power socket to 240V three-pin plug adapter, for charging a laptop or camera battery prepay wireless 3G modem a dozen bottles of water stashed in the cupboard cash, for when ATMs aren’t working a gas BBQ to cook that defrosting meat in the freezer.

7. The first thing I did after the shaking stopped was tweet. Twitter, especially in the first hour, was well ahead of the mainstream media in instantly breaking news, locating the quake, and reporting damage. Radio also did a good job later that morning, so I’d add a battery-less radio to the emergency stash; the web streaming services of the radio stations did not cope well. TV took all day to catch up and was generally hopeless.

8. For Twitter to work, everyone has to agree on a hashtag, like #eqnz. Joyce was tracking the clumsy “hashtag wars” different media outlets were fighting. Some people pointed out the correct hashtag wasn’t the most important thing about the quake, which is certainly true if you weren’t using Twitter. But many, many people will be using Twitter or a similar service soon as a primary information source, so the media have to get used to mentioning the “official hashtag” in their stories.

9. Building things out of bricks is a fine English tradition, but England doesn’t straddle a plate boundary.

10. Looters in Christchurch will break into a liquor store, ignore the brandy and single malts, and carry out cases of beer. And I would bet it wasn’t even very good beer.

11. I went for a stroll to look for obvious quake damage, but my part of Bryndwr is so grungy it was, quite seriously, hard to discern. Was that street sign leaning drunkenly last week? Quite possibly. Is that wall newly crumbling, did a boy racer scrape it, or was it just shoddily built in 1955? Look for fresh plaster dust on the asphalt.

12. It’s actually possible to have an earthquake this severe not kill anybody. So, as Robyn points out, we’re not a third-world country. Hurrah. Not that Christchurch escaped scot-free: billions of dollars of damage, and 90 or so buildings trashed, many grand and historic.

13. Lucky last: this was not, by a long shot, “the big one”. That would be a magnitude 8.0 or so, which hits New Zealand every couple of hundred years (the last was in the Wairarapa in 1855). The Richter scale is logarithmic, so that’s something ten times as wobbly as today’s—the size of the San Francisco earthquake (3000 dead), or the 2008 Sichuan quake (which killed 68,000). Let’s not get too complacent about our building codes.

[Appeared 7 Sept 2010 on the NZ Herald website.]