Christchurch!

How awful is this? Colette and Jimmy are jaunting around Spain and Portugal on a holiday of a lifetime when they hear the day-old news that Christchurch in New Zealand has had a 7.4 earthquake.

Panic! Their only son Robert goes to Canterbury University in Christchurch!

Immediate scramble to find news in disinterested Spain but they eventually do and all is fine.  Robert is fine.  He simply woke up at 4 in the morning with the apartment rocking from side-to-side, and spent ten minutes trying to get out of his bedroom, constantly being tossed back into the room.

Oh, and note what he said ... something important which is also exactly what our friends Heather and Christine said when they were caught up in the Sichuan Earthquake a few years back ... that the earth itself was moving from side-to-side, like those plates in that funpark ride, and not in the usual up-and down that normally happens in earthquakes.

Here's footage taken from a security camera where you can really see the side-to-side movements:



From this, I'm guessing that side-to-side is what happens when tectonic plates shift up against each other - what they call "The Big One" - and up-and-down is more like the earth-settling kind of earthquake.

As for Robert there at Canterbury University, his digs at the uni were fine, although a friend in another building similarly woke up and flung himself, for safety, into the space between his bed and the wall ... and then proceeded to fall four floors riding down the rubble, surfing on the wall as the building collapsed around him.  He isn't badly hurt, BTW.  More bruised than anything ... and now has enviable bragging rights among the other students at Canterbury: totally the hero of the campus!

The good news is that Canterbury University is fine.  All buildings are intact, and the only truly serious problem on campus is the various libraries more-than-one-million books that need re-shelving as they are all in insane heaps all over the floor, practically to the ceilings, and the university is now closed until this is done.  Oh boy, weeks and weeks and weeks of work there:  I wonder if Red Cross has a Librarian Unit?  An army of librarians who they parachute in all over the globe to restack library shelves after major catastrophes!

However, much more serious is the damage done to the city itself, especially all the exquisite heritage buildings which were, unfortunately, built in bricks and mortar which can never withstand this sort of treatment. Christchurch is - WAS - a beautiful city.  From all over the world, film folks used to come over to use it as the set for the English city of Oxford as it was from the turn of last century up until WWII.  And you'd know the University of Canterbury very well too, since it always stands in as the sets for Oxford or Cambridge University, so students at Canterbury are used to forever seeing folks like Gwyneth Paltrow, Judi Dench and Kate Winslet wandering round their grounds.

Like me find a film trailer or two so you can have a look at Christchurch as it was and so you too can mourn what the world has lost.

Here's "Iris", the film about Iris Murdoch, however you don't get to see much of the campus here; just a few of the interiors, and a bit of the beach and the surrounding countryside:



Try again:

Ah, much better:  "Sylvia", the film about Sylvia Plath!



Gorgeous, aren't they, those few shots of the buildings.  And the surrounding countryside is nice too.

But, anyway, that's where Robert was studying ... but the world around him collapsed and there's aftershock after aftershock and he's refusing to leave so Colette, his mum, is frantic and worried sick and shouting "You get on that plane right now.  You go back to Fiji RIGHT NOW!" but she's in Spain and can't enforce her command, and Robert's insisting that he stay right where he is to help where needful ...



... and all is very grim and short of flying in and dragging him away, Colette doesn't know what to do!

But yesterday, here in HK, Robert calls his parents and guess where he is.  Yup, he finally did what he was told and he's back in Fiji!  And you know what convinced him?  No, not his mum and dad.  He reports that after over 300 smaller aftershocks there was another aftershock almost as large as the first one ... and it turns out the epicentre of the quake has moved from 30 miles off-shore to less than half a mile off-shore and talk is that "This is it!  It's setting itself up for The Big One! And the city, with the university, is about to go-for-good!"

Kiwis are definitely not HK-style Chicken-Little panic-merchants, and are more usually a larconic casual sort of crew, forever into just riding it out, used to earthquakes and such, and definitely not given to dramatising ...

... I mean, just look at the news report on September 4th, explaining what had just happened!

Lots of good links in there too of the damage!

... so I guess if they're now talking about The Big One, we do have to pause for thought ... and turn back the army of parachuting librarians ... and maybe even dash over the water to wait it out in Fiji.  So, yayyyy, smart move.  You GO, Robert!