INTERESTING TIMES

 

I guess Robert needs to beware of that third curse.

We experienced an earthquake when on Rakiura Stewart Island last week. The house we were in rocked and bucked. It was a 5.3 shallow quake centred a bit south of S.I.

This morning we woke to learn of 3 earthquakes centred, relatively shallow, in The Kermedec Islands north of New Zealand. The most severe was a whopping 8.1 magnitude. Thank Robert's God that he's a bit geographically challenged and didn't centre it anywhere in New Zealand.

As a consequence however these quakes triggered tsunami alerts on the east coast. In Northland we had text alerts, coastal tsunami sirens, the local fire brigade siren and police and firemen travelling around telling everyone to evacuate to higher ground. We took this seriously as I felt that so much expense and effort has gone into setting up these warnings and precautions, and, I am a member of the local civil defence. We quickly packed a backpack with water, fruit and our cellphones and drove off to a high point up behind our house. I'm pleased to say that a good many other people did the same and so for a few hours a small community formed beneath the mountain.

We were lucky that today is such a nice day - no wind, sunny and warm. Over the last few days though we have had torrential rain and high winds so the old Chinese curse wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Police and firefighters came around to update everyone of what was happening and when the alert might be lifted. They distributed bottled water to anyone who hadn't brought provisions. 

It was all civil and friendly which makes me proud to be a New Zealander.

A strange family set up a table and chairs and got granny out of the back of the car. They were quite noisy and at least one of them was still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown.

I know that in emergencies people have to move quickly, but, in this case, not that quickly.

We stayed until 12.30PM when the high tide was turning. I figured that the biggest earthquake, the 8.1M was several hours after the first ones from which the wave surges had already hit parts of Northland,  so we'd be OK going home for some lunch. We planned to go back to high ground a couple of hours later. I was correct as about a half hour after  we had lunch the alert was lifted.

Interesting.

How's your day going?