Armchair Experts

The Christchurch earthquake has dominated the news here since it happened and has got a lot of coverage around the world judging by the amount of emails we have received. Fortunately everyone we know in Christchurch is OK. One friend was in the Cathedral a few minutes before the quake and had just left  and crossed the street when the steeple collapsed. Here in Auckland everything is normal and we are all fine. Thanks to everyone who sent messages. 

Apparently some Japanese journalists have been critical of the NZ rescue people saying that they were too slow and didn' t do enough for the foreign students who were in the CTV building. I believe that's totally unjustified and unfair of them. NZ is not prepared for such an earthquake because it simply has not happened before. Earthquakes that flatten cities are pretty rare here so it follows that we don't have the same resources as Japan where it happens more regularly. There is also complaints from the family members who have come here. They complain that they are not well informed of whats happening. Again this is simply not true. The TV stations here devoted all their resources to covering this event and TV1 and TV3 ran no other programming from 7AM to 11PM for the first few days. It is their lack of English ability that is the problem. Anyone who feels they were not well informed is being unreasonable. The Japanese doing the complaining should have devoted that energy to finding translators who could have told them exactly what was going on. The focus for the first week was finding and rescuing survivors not on identifying bodies. The government here was very quick to ask for international assistance and to their credit the Japanese government was quick to respond by sending a large team to assist. The fact is the CTV building collapsed and then caught fire. There was no chance that anybody could have survived this. The Japanese government was informed of this but the  Japan media it seems, did not report this and is responsible for creating false hope and the following disappointment and criticism. It was a tragedy for certain but there was nothing anyone could do about it and to second guess the rescue people after the fact is unfair and unreasonable. 

The other point of discussion is the construction of the CTV building and the codes it was built to. This is an old building that was constructed in the 70's before any earthquake code was formulated. Just as happened in Kobe in 1995, this old building just was not able to stand tup to his event while the newer ones around it were much less affected.

I am not a great fan of the current NZ government but I think they handled this event very well and I doubt anyone could have done any better. The NZ journalists and reporters also rose to the occasion and their performance was much better than usual. The international assistance was prompt and high quality. Search teams came from Australia, US, UK, Taiwan, Singapore, China and Japan. A team from Mexico also came but were not allowed to work in the city centre because of some stupid UN accreditation rule. These guys have had experience all over the world in places like Haiti and Chile and paid their own airfares to come here. Luckily the Kiwis in the suburbs don't have any time for UN bullshit and the Mexicans help was gratefully accepted in these areas. Apart from that silly episode, I think this is probably a textbook example of how to deal with an Earthquake in a modern city and that other countries, including Japan would do well to study it.