Time travel

My latest time-machine travel (see previous post) took me to New Zealand on the first day of this year. It was December 30 when I boarded the plane in San Francisco, the morning of January 1when it landed in Auckland. New Year’s Eve had vanished. Gone without murmur or mention, let alone festivity. The nearest I came to any celebration was the sight of some bedraggled left-over revellers in Queen Street, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare.

Auckland is the country’s biggest urban area by very far, with about a third of the country’s entire population of some 4.4 million people. But it hasn’t been the seat of government since 1865, when the move was made to the more centrally located Wellington, the world’s most southerly capital city, where I have been for the past month. It is built on and between the steep slopes that surround one of the world’s biggest deep-sea harbours. Look up and you can see innumerable private homes and commercial buildings perched on the steep hillsides, often amid greenery. Very attractive – but for the fact that this is very much an earthquake-risk region with no fewer than four fault lines, one of them running through the city.

The last major quake may have been in the 1850s, but there have been two well above 4 on the Richter scale felt here since I arrived and the next really big bang could come tomorrow, next week, in a month’s time or many decades or scores of years from now. This has been known for a long time, of course, but minds have been sharpened by the Christchurch disaster on February 22 last year, when much of the centre of that city and thousands of homes were destroyed, or have had to be demolished. 185 people were killed, 115 of them in one high-rise building. And most of the devastation remains to be seen. And repaired.

A new report into the ability of Wellington to withstand an earthquake on a similar same scale estimates it would cost the economy 37 billion NZD (tens of billions of anyone’s money), that many important enterprises and the Government itself could be forced to leave, perhaps permanently, though little is said about the potentially devastating human cost. 435 city buildings have been identified as being particularly hazardous. Many are located along important roads so that the few routes into and out of the city could be blocked by rubble.

A map has been published marking in red streets at risk from what are termed ‘earthquake-prone’ buildings, while those 'potentially' at risk are in orange. If I look at the street where I am staying and where I am right now (in a high rise building)... I see it is in the darkest of reds.

Hmm...