Some of the busiest people following the earthquake are tradespeople. There’ll be a heap of work to do with regards to making buildings safe, fixing water pipes and sorting out electrical problems. Christchurch builders, Carl and Maria McHaffie of McHaffie Homes, are running around the city right now taking care of earthquake damaged homes and workplaces.

One of their key specialities right now appears to be chimney removal! I joined them this morning to take down a friend’s chimney that looked like it was about to fall. We removed the bricks layer by layer from the top down using a mallet and chisel. By the time we got to the last 4 or 5 levels, we no longer needed the mallet as the mortar had crumbled and the bricks were completely loose following the earthquake. Another good aftershock and the whole thing would have collapsed and gone through the neighbour’s window.

If you have a chimney, wall, ceiling or anything else that needs a professional builder’s attention in Christchurch, give Carl and Maria a call on 021 406 112 or at the office (03) 351 5382 (although they’ll be better on the cellphone as they’ll probably be on the road). Tell them I sent you!

Apparently this happened in a cordoned-off area. Just prior to this, a resident had moved a traffic cone so that she could drive through into the no-go-zone. She was then followed by 4 or 5 other cars before the fire engine came along.

Good argument for keeping away from the danger areas, even if the road looks ok.

I’ve just caught the end of a horrific story on the news of a woman that got caught in quicksand near Kaiapoi and sank up to her neck before managing to claw her way out. Mad stuff. Stay safe out there.

Update: Mark sure you boil your drinking water for at least 3 minutes on a rolling boil before drinking. Sewers have ruptured and may be leaking into drinking and washing water pipes.

Mark Lincoln, a local blog writer, was seen today helping the fire brigade save thousands of lives in Christchurch following the earthquake.

Ok, no that’s not true. I’ve been on the roof of a relative’s house clearing rubble and securing tarpaulins. The wind really picked up this morning but seems to have died down for the moment. There was a short and very light amount of rain but that’s passed for now too. Mostly we’ve been clearing bricks that are lying on the top of the roof and removing loose bricks from the chimney in case of further aftershocks.

While I was up there, two firemen poked their heads over the fence and asked if we needed assistance. They’ve been slowly driving along the streets in the area and asking locals if they need help. They’ve found that when they stop to talk to someone, other people come out of their houses to talk about other problems.

Overnight, there were plenty of aftershocks. For a while it felt like they were every 15 minutes or so. Some large enough to bang the cupboard doors and frighten the dog.

The city centre is still blocked off. My own office on Tuam Street is flooded and destroyed as the sprinklers turned on at the time of the quake and have been running ever since. Like many other places, the building looked fine from the outside but the inside was a different story. The CEO was allowed in under supervision of a police officer. On seeing the damage, the police office said ‘You have 60 seconds to get out of here’ and they made a sharp exit.

]]> http://www.nzraw.co.nz/news/new-zealand-news/local-blog-writer-assists-fire-brigade/feed/ 1 http://www.nzraw.co.nz/news/new-zealand-news/christchurch-earthquake-information/ http://www.nzraw.co.nz/news/new-zealand-news/christchurch-earthquake-information/#comments Sat, 04 Sep 2010 01:51:23 +0000 Mark http://www.nzraw.co.nz/?p=1387

The Minister of Civil Defence has just said that the earthquake that occurred at 4:35am, 7.1 on the richter scale, is the strongest in Christchurch since 1931. Check out the latest photos from the aftermath plus some initial Christchurch earthquake photos from just after the earthquake occurred.

A state of emergency has officially been called – this gives the authorities the power to arrest anyone in certain areas if they believe those people shouldn’t be there.

8 people have been rescued around Christchurch so far – some from electrically operated lifts – and there are 2 people in hospital with ‘serious’ injuries.

Large areas of Christchurch have been, and still are, without power and water although representatives say 90% of Christchurch will have power restored to them today. Areas of Bromley, Aranui and others were without power earlier this morning but power has since been restored. New Brighton roads appear to be mostly underwater. It’s tempting to drive through them in a 4WD but many are there due to large cracks in the road that lie hidden under the water.

The GeoNet website shows a large number of recent earthquakes, the majority from today, all of varying magnitudes and depths.

Aftershocks are expected for the days following the initial earthquake. Many could be reasonably substantial. The Christchurch City Council Civil Defence guys are setting up welfare centres where people can go if they feel unsafe in their own home. The centres will provide food, water, shelter and minor first aid. For more info, visit the Civil Defence website.

I’ve now managed to go for a walk around Avonside and survey the damage following the Christchurch earthquake, which has now been downgraded to 7.1 on the richter scale after earlier reports that it was 7.4.

The damage to the road around the Avonside boat club is pretty impressive. Bridges are closed and the police are patrolling the streets. As I write this, an occasional aftershock rocks the house which has 2 collapsed and 1 about-to-collapse chimneys on the roof.

New photos of the Christchurch earthquake

Geonet say aftershocks are likely and could carry on occurring weeks later. Potentially they could be quite large too.

I managed to get out in the truck this morning and grab some Christchurch earthquake photos and a video or two. Some areas look totally fine while others look like something from Armageddon.

Photos of the Christchurch Earthquake

I’ve yet to get some really awesome ones and now we’re being told to stay at home and keep out of the way. Large areas of Christchurch are flooded, have been cordoned off or are inaccessible due to bridges collapsing or huge cracks appearing in the road with water and sand coming up.

A roof collapsed near my friend’s place on Croydon Street in Spreydon.

The major hazard now is unsafe walls and tall brick chimneys that are close to collapse. Aftershocks can be big enough to cause further collapse and damage.

Bricks fallen on the pavement. You wouldn’t want to be near any chimneys and old walls right now.

Inside a roof space in Avonside. Could install one really big sky-light now.

Large cracks appearing in the park near Avonside. Earth has been pushed up along the centre of the river. The fields are flooded.

Earth pushed up all the way along the centre of a river … or have the cracks drained the river and the ridge was already there?

A carport collapse in Aranui.

Christchurch Earthquake Videos

I’ve only managed to capture a single clip or two. This is driving past an upper floor wall that had fallen into the road, exposes the contents of the room.

Christchurch Phone Networks

According to the news, the Vodafone cellphone towers are on battery backup and may only have 60 minutes run time left. Other reports say that Vodafone may only be the network that is bringing in back-up generators.

I’ll post again soon when I have better photos. Currently I’m sitting in a room with a collapsed chimney above it so probably shouldn’t sit around here too long in case of aftershocks!

Yup that’s right. To hell with search engine optimisation. No links allowed! Maybe Google themselves even received an email that said “Hey, if we find our site in your results, heads will roll!”.

NBR pointed this out earlier today with an article about Auckland Council’s new website.

Ironically, NBR linked to the page that says that links are not allowed without explicit link permission from the people that give you permission to link.

Very shortly after this was mentioned on Twitter and picked up by influential tweeters such as myself (cough), the entire website collapsed.

Did the powers-that-be take the site down? Or perhaps there was a REASON no one was allowed to link to the site? Maybe linking to the site caused the server to melt-down? Are there desperate website technicians somewhere that are drowning in the emotional ocean that is the loss of their new website, sorry, Website? Is it all NBR’s fault?

Not too long after that, the website was reinstated but, alas, without the humourous “linking’s a no-no” condition. What a shame. Expecting this, the geniuses at NBR plus the genius at NZRAW (that’ll be me then) took snapshots of the message before it was removed. NBR added it to their post and you can see it here too:

Funny that other websites all suck so much that they need to be spelt with a lower-case wuh yet the Auckland Council Website is epic enough to be spelt with a capital wuh. Could this interesting style of proof-reading also explain why they have a news article on their homepage which announces the launch of the new website today, Thursday 1st July. Despite it being Wednesday, the 30th June?

So yes, while short-lived, this special condition brought joy and mirth to the hearts of many in the wuh wuh wuh. Thanks Auckland Council. To show our appreciation, here’s a free link.

Link.

Update: One of the Google ads that may come up on the right there is for the Yellow Pages councils category that features links to the city councils.

No, Yellow Pages! No linking! Bad Yellow Pages.

But last weekend’s World Cup football match for New Zealand just takes the piss! New Zealand is rightfully basking in the glory of what, at first glance, might otherwise appear to be a mediocre game.

The All White’s 1-all draw against Slovakia might not look like much on the surface but has actually been described as the greatest result in New Zealand’s footballing history.

Stuff.co.nz posted a fantastic photo of the goal, which shows the awesome look of triumph on goal scorer, Winston Reid’s, face.

In the mean time, Australia went on to lose 4-0 to Germany. Which brings me nicely to more Australia-trying-to-hog-the-glory..-ness.  In a game that the world clearly knew as New Zealand versus Slovakia, tell me what’s wrong with this Sydney Morning Herald headline:

Yup. Australasia 1 – Slovakia 1. Australasia? OK, New Zealand is part of Australasia but if it was England versus Slovakia you wouldn’t exactly say Europe 1 – Slovaka 1 would you? Unless you were from a country called Europia and you wanted to claim back some of the glory for yourself!

There’ll probably even be a lot of internationals (Americans) that will glance at that page and have no idea they’re talking about New Zealand. I mean let’s face it, they could be talking about Christmas Island versus Slovakia with a title like that.

The Sydney Morning Herald reporter that wrote it, John Huxley, opens the article with a scoff at the All White’s manliness and a reference to them being the least watchable team of the 32 nations and then goes on to slate the match.

At least the poll at the end of the article shows that 74% of the article’s readers think that the All Whites are “capable of emulating the Socceroos of 2006″. In your face, Huxley!

Let’s hope that New Zealand’s shining voice to the world, The Flight of the Conchords, will create a good novelty song about this one day.

Update: The Guardian newspaper in England gave New Zealand the respect they deserved:

“The World Cup may not have seen a great game yet, but the tournament has been startled … Nobody supposed this would be the fixture to set the World Cup alight at last. It might as well have been clad in asbestos for most of the time. New Zealand are absolved of blame. Their intent to attack was apparent in the use of three forwards and there is no shame in Herbert’s team making few chances.”

This morning, my wife called me to ask me if I’ve moved her car. Questions like this spark immediate concern!

Yes, my wife’s car was stolen last night from right outside our house. Ok it was only a 1992 Nissan Bluebird, registration plate TZ9717, but the thing about a 1992 Nissan Bluebird is that if you own a 1992 Nissan Bluebird it’s generally because you can’t afford anything flasher than a 1992 Nissan Bluebird. So in some ways, losing our Nissan has caused us as much grief as if we’d lost a BMW M3.

Secretly I was also upset as, despite the fact that I have a Hilux 4WD, my wife’s car is the only one with a tow bar and we were planning on using it extensively to help us move into our first home in a couple of weeks.

Anyway. Worse than having a car stolen from you is the underlying feeling that it was stolen from you by someone in the immediate neighbourhood.

Not so long ago, we noticed that someone had been stealing petrol from it. So we put a lockable petrol cap on it. Not long after that, we noticed that someone was stealing mail from our mailbox. So we put a padlock on the mailbox. Not long after that, we noticed that someone was using our wheelie bin for their own refuse disposal. If we had a big enough chain, I swear I’d put a padlock on that too.

I feel like these three absolutely heinous crimes are in someway related. I’d love to think it’s not the older guy two doors from me who quite happily says hello when he sees us in the street … but I did startle him once while he was walking up to our mailbox one day. The way he suddenly realised I was watching him and then did a sharp 180 and hurridly walked off in the opposite direction really made me wonder. He also seems to sit at home all day smoking drugs with random people that turn up at the house so he’s not exactly a first-rate citizen EVEN THOUGH he leant me his hose once.

But hey. At least we have insurance right? And I’m talking the full blown “all the options” insurance from a reputable company like AMI. Although … wait a sec. I was very careful to select “Agreed Value” when we got our car insurance as I’d been stung with “Market Value” before.

Market Value is where you pay a premium each month and when your car gets stolen or someone ploughs into it with his Subaru (thanks Jeremy by the way) the insurance company gets one of their guys to look at your car and say “Yeah .. it’s worth about this much” and they pay you that much minus your excess.

HOWEVER. Here’s the part that sucks. We check our insurance documents and find that AMI have lowered the AGREED value of our car by $200 dollars. What’s that all about AMI? Well it’s because it’s depreciated in value. OK so what’s Market Value all about then?? Well … that’s when we value your car based on how much it’s depreciated in value. OK so what’s AGREED value then??? Well … ok yeah we’re just trying to screw you. Suckers! So you lowered the value of our car. Did you lower the amount we pay each month? No. We put it up. Yeah. We feel bad now … NOT!

So in summary, by the time we’ve paid our excess and received our payment from our insurance company, we’ll have about $100 and no car. What can we get for $100? Well … we can get two thirds of a battery powered kid’s quad bike. That should do us. I hear that Christchurch will be fitted with NZ’s first charge-point network for recharging electric cars so we’ll be set.

UPDATE!

It’s about an hour since I wrote this post. After publishing it, I went to pick my wife up from the mall where she was having training for her new job (had to pick her up as she had no car … are you following the story?). On the way home, I was casually keeping an eye out for any Bluebirds parked in dodgy alleys.

We’re travelling down Brougham Street towards the Lyttelton tunnel and through the trees I spot a Bluebird parked in a dead-end street. The Bluebird had a small white rectangular sticker in the back window. Hmm … that looks familiar. So I take a few random turnings down side-roads while my wife looks at my with a confused expression. Then we round the final corner and ….

… bam! There’s our car. It was on Vincent Place, Woolston. If you have a car that’s still not been recovered, maybe it’s down there too?

Whoever stole it:

a) was a girl or had a girl with them (there was girl’s deoderant and yeah I thought it was some sniffing drug abuser but then we found some girl’s lip balm as well)

b) used half a tank of petrol and didn’t exactly do the tyres and brakes any favours

c) was probably going to come back for a second go

I assume they were going to come back because they’d actually re-locked the car! They’d forced the ignition but other than that there was no damage to the car at all. Plus they’d left the perfectly-stealable CD player stereo AND they’d even left their own CD in the player.

I’m almost tempted to park it up in the same spot and then do a Lethal Weapon style stake-out. But I really don’t have the patience for that.

So, we called the cops. I told them what brand of deoderant and lip balm was in the car and they instantly knew EXACTLY who the criminal was and said they’ll knock on their door any day now (I hope all car criminals are reading this and know how amazingly efficient the police are)*

The car itself is now parked right outside our front door, which happens to be directly below our bedroom window, plus I have carefully made a few minor adjustments to the vehicle which means that anyone driving away in it will very soon end up in the Avon river.

Now I get to call AMI back and tell them to change my policy.

P.S. My wife and I would like to say thank you to all the people on Twitter who re-tweeted my status update in order to help us find our car or offered words of advice.

@HatchiNZ @daz_bLazem @nzben @simonleslienz @phillipnewmannz @ditzy_m @I_enigma @MiramarMike … you guys rock our socks. Thank you.

*The part about the cops being efficient wasn’t true.

To do this on an international stage, I believe it is imperative that our military is seen to be free of religion. Extremist religions beliefs have been the foundation of many wars throughout history, perhaps made most infamous when Hitler declared Judaism a race rather than a religion and insisted on trying to wipe out that ‘race’.

Many conflicts occur based on a difference in religious views between two parties. Land and resources are obviously also often a large part of the equation but often religion is still involved in some way. So, if in Country X there’s a division between two military groups – one division trying to wipe out the other due to different religious beliefs – then it is the job of organisations such as the United Nations (that NZ became a member of in 1945) to minimise harm to civilian life and infrastructure and to attempt to bring the leaders of each group together to resolve their differences peacefully.

The only way the United Nations can do this effectively is by being a voice of reason that takes no side when it comes to religion. If our military forces join the fight in the name of a Christian God and start preaching another set of religious views, we lose our impartial stance and add to the conflict. It’s like we’re joining in and saying “Actually you two chaps can stop fighting each other over your religious views because you’re BOTH wrong. Now, die in the name of our beliefs”.

Right now you’re thinking “What’s your point? The New Zealand army doesn’t do this” but actually, if our supplier of Acog gunsights (Trijicon) had their way, you’d be wrong.

According to the article “undesirable biblical references to be removed” on the Stuff.co.nz website …

(Acog) Rifle sights used by Kiwi troops were supplied with references to Bible verses that appear in raised lettering at the end of the stock number.

Markings include “JN8:12″, a reference to John 8:12: “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’.”

Now what message is this sending a) our troops and b) the ‘enemy’? If you get shot by a New Zealand soldier carrying a weapon with a bible reference are you going to think you’ve been shot in the name of peace or in the name of religion?

Our Defence Force actually found out about these references when The Press notified them. Thankfully, the Defence Force made the right decision. According to the Press, Defence Force spokesperson Major Kristian Dunne said:

“It’s put us in an uncomfortable situation. We can see how they would cause offence. We are unhappy they didn’t make us aware of it … They send the wrong sort of message. They cause the same problems as putting slogans on bombs … We should not be doing anything that might give opponents any propaganda leverage.”

Which I think is spot on. Good on ya NZ Defence Force! However, some people disagree. Slater of Whaleoil, recently made real-world-famous by sparking a debate on name suppression laws when he allegedly ‘outed’ a convicted NZ entertainer, has written a blog post in response to the Press artice.

His article, titled “WTF is wrong with our military” shows that he is not only supporting the references but thinks that they should be changed to some even stronger “enemy smiting” verses. He then goes on to call for the current Defence Force Minister’s resignation for being “a big blouse”.

Now I’m not against some of the things that Slater is trying to do. He’s an advocate for the Police following the same laws as ourselves and for name suppression of “kiddy-fiddlers” to be removed just because the defendant is famous (well, NZ famous). But he really does seem to be turning into some kind of religious military activist himself! He posts a weekly article called “Wednesday Weapons” featuring a different weapon each week and now he’s saying that New Zealand should be forcing ‘our’ religion on those that we kill.

All of this came to my attention when I saw a Twitter discussion/argument between an NZ Tweeter and Whaleoil.

The Tweeter said religion causes so much conflict, why push it further? In my point of view this is spot on. When two religions are fighting, bringing a third religion into the fight is like throwing petrol on a fire. And apparently the NZ Defence Force agrees.

The Twitter discussion continues. The tweeter suggests that the NZ Defence Force should be seen as neutral during conflicts. Slater (as Whaleoil) replies:

there is no such thing as neutral when bullets are trying to kill you, get in the real world not the fairytale of your mind.

So Slater seems to be suggesting that all soldiers in the NZ Defence Force find religion when faced with death (he reflects this in his blog article) and fight for that religion rather than for the objectives of the NZ Defence Force. Slater later goes on to say:

Ever been shot at by someone trying to kill you? Didn’t think so… it’s a bible reference so what, bet the taleban hve koran refs

Now Slater’s taking more of a “They do it so why can’t we?”. Yeah sure good call. The Taliban go around killing people in the name of religion so why can’t we? Makes total sense.

Before all of this, I hadn’t made my mind up on Slater. I feel like he’s going a good thing trying to bring ‘injustices’ to our attention and he’s sparked a lot of debate. Whether he’s done this in the right way or not (by allegedly ignoring a name suppression order) was what gave me concern before I decided if he was doing the right thing. But after all of this, I’m strongly against his opinion and hope that he’s not causing more harm than good with his articles (which now have a very high readership after the publicity surrounding his legal case).

- Photo of Trijicon Acog gunsight from Flickr user KLaFaille used under Creative Commons license.

Trijicon today said in a statement it would remove biblical references from all military products, as well as supply kits to US and other military to remove the references on existing equipment.