Did the Earth move for you?
Martin Doyle
ONE of my favourite books is The Great Gatsby.
Early on in the piece, the narrator describes Gatsby as having “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away”. I think any Wellingtonian who reads those words can identify with them. We’ve all felt earthquakes. And if you imagine those quakes were centred ten thousand miles away, you can half imagine you’ve got a “heightened sensitivity”. But the trouble is you don’t have to have a heightened sensitivity to feel earthquakes in Wellington. You just have to be here. And how do you know there’s been an earthquake? Simple: one minute you’re laughing and saying what a great life it is, and the next you’re lying face-down on the ground and bone china is rattling all around you. And you don’t always get much reaction time. And people, for better or worse, make different choices.
It was like that on Saturday night when we got hit by that rather sudden, rather big, earthquake centred somewhere in Cook Strait. At the time, there were just two of us in our house. As the quake struck, and rumbled on, and on, we were able to holler out to each other. One of us opted to stand under a door while the other scampered outside into the open air. Apparently, that’s what Wellingtonians did in 1855 when the Capital got hit by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in New Zealand: 8.2 magnitude!! The key thing locals learned from it (and we still live by today) was the advantage of living in wooden houses. They’d had a bad earthquake seven years earlier and people had noticed that wood was better. The 1855 one confirmed it.
In much the same way, I think Wellington needs to learn from, register (you could say), the natural disasters that have been escalating round the globe in recent years. In particular, the tsunamis. It could well be that a tsunami (“harbour wave”, in Japanese), or tidal wave, poses more risk to us than even a large earthquake. Take these three factors: 1)we sit atop two tectonic plates 2) We are prone to earthquakes 3) We’re wedged like a bar of soap between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. There you have the lethal ingredients for huge tsunamis.
My pick is that when a tsunami hits Wellington, as it surely will, no one will be ready for it. In fact, office-workers in Wellington are trained to leave their buildings after an earthquake and to ‘meet on the other side of the road’. That would prove fatal in the event of a tsunami. You might only have five minutes warning of a tsunami. In those precious minutes, everyone would need to quickly move to higher ground, or to higher floors within buildings. [And make sure you bring the snack machine when you come.]
Early on in the piece, the narrator describes Gatsby as having “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away”. I think any Wellingtonian who reads those words can identify with them. We’ve all felt earthquakes. And if you imagine those quakes were centred ten thousand miles away, you can half imagine you’ve got a “heightened sensitivity”. But the trouble is you don’t have to have a heightened sensitivity to feel earthquakes in Wellington. You just have to be here. And how do you know there’s been an earthquake? Simple: one minute you’re laughing and saying what a great life it is, and the next you’re lying face-down on the ground and bone china is rattling all around you. And you don’t always get much reaction time. And people, for better or worse, make different choices.
It was like that on Saturday night when we got hit by that rather sudden, rather big, earthquake centred somewhere in Cook Strait. At the time, there were just two of us in our house. As the quake struck, and rumbled on, and on, we were able to holler out to each other. One of us opted to stand under a door while the other scampered outside into the open air. Apparently, that’s what Wellingtonians did in 1855 when the Capital got hit by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in New Zealand: 8.2 magnitude!! The key thing locals learned from it (and we still live by today) was the advantage of living in wooden houses. They’d had a bad earthquake seven years earlier and people had noticed that wood was better. The 1855 one confirmed it.
In much the same way, I think Wellington needs to learn from, register (you could say), the natural disasters that have been escalating round the globe in recent years. In particular, the tsunamis. It could well be that a tsunami (“harbour wave”, in Japanese), or tidal wave, poses more risk to us than even a large earthquake. Take these three factors: 1)we sit atop two tectonic plates 2) We are prone to earthquakes 3) We’re wedged like a bar of soap between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean. There you have the lethal ingredients for huge tsunamis.
My pick is that when a tsunami hits Wellington, as it surely will, no one will be ready for it. In fact, office-workers in Wellington are trained to leave their buildings after an earthquake and to ‘meet on the other side of the road’. That would prove fatal in the event of a tsunami. You might only have five minutes warning of a tsunami. In those precious minutes, everyone would need to quickly move to higher ground, or to higher floors within buildings. [And make sure you bring the snack machine when you come.]
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