Life is back to normal. Sort of. If you don't count the cracks in every room of the house, the chimney sitting in pieces in the driveway and the piece of plastic covering the hole in the roof that flaps and bangs at disconcerting times in the night.
Oh, that and the morning commute, which used to take 5-10 minutes, but today took 25, thanks to the blocked roads and reconstruction going oneverywhere. On the upside Christchurch actually looks like a real city for a change, with hurricane fences, scaffolding and construction noise everywhere. Truly, to me it just looks the way New York did when we were there a couple of months back.
We've been luckier at work than at home, where the chaos of that Saturday morning was quickly put right in a morning's cleaning on Monday.
Still, geonet still sits open on the corner of my screen and I can't help but have half a eye on it most of the time, watching to make sure those little squares remain little and don't turn an alarming yellow or orange colour. Last time that happened was that Wednesday morning 5.1 that shot what remained of the city's nerves to pieces and sent the kids and I scurrying to Wellington - oh the irony. An Air NZ staff member told me they sold $20k worth of tickets that morning - at the airport alone.
While the quake marked a turning point of a sorts for Christchurch, it also heralded a new age for social media in New Zealand, being the first time that services like Twitter took the lead in keeping kiwis connected to what was going on.
I think the memory of all four of us huddled under a doorway in the dark and cold for 3 hours that horrible morning, fumbling with cellphones and hitting the 'refresh' button on news sites every few minutes to find nothing. Nothing! for what felt like - and it reality was - an eternity - will stay with me forever. Twitter was the last thing on our mind. TVNZ and Radio NZ, the state broadcasters who should have been there for us at a time like this were the first - but as useless as yesterday's paper. Internet was knocked out with the power.
Even the Civil Defence website gave us nothing. Radio was out - it's been so long since we've used a wireless (as my grandmother used to say), that the only one we could unearth that morning was useless, its batteries rusted over.
It was Twitter to the rescue, within minutes. Twitter that reassured us that this wasn't, in fact, the end of the world (or Wellington, our first thought) as we knew it. Twitter that gave us instant connection with others in the same point and that was able to answer the question: what just happened? not just at 4.45, but for every one of those almost 700 aftershocks that continued to shake us in more ways than one, in the fortnight that followed.
It was also Twitter that provided instant human-interest fodder and a constant stream of stories to fill the pages and minutes of traditional media reports.
Mainstream media woke up, fully, in time. I don't know how long it was before any of the news sites had even a mention of the quake - it felt like hours and hours. If you haven't been there it is almost unimaginable, that sense of cold, dark and shock, all rolled into one, and the awful, gut wrenching sense of disconnection and isolation that is layered on top when all the usual ways that information usually flows, dry up. Along with the water in the taps.
The people who cut a swathe through the city's local newsrooms a decade or so ago, networkingthe crap out of everything that moved, should have to go through that some time. So should the people running the national networks that would, we were assured, still be there for us. But of course, they're all long gone, relocated to newly elevated positions in Auckland funded by the fruits of their cost-cutting labours.
Nuff said, rant over.
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