Christchurch Earthquake

As a resident of Christchurch, I have been incommunicado for several days: power and water outages, and what not.

Fortunately we survived the experience reasonably well: house still standing and habitable; were well enough prepared with potables and edibles; had a choice of cooking facilities (camp stove for rainy weather, barbeque for fine; dug a temporary relief centre in the back yard, which we used for 3 days or so.

Wargaming stuff took a hiding, in the sense of being thrown all about the place. Still going through my lead Napoleonics - some casualties, but surprisingly few. Haven't looked at my plastics yet - haven't dared look into the WW2 kitsets (of which I have hundreds). Altogether the quake made a huge mess, but at least we have noe cleared the floors. A bit reluctant to stack the stuff so high this time. They stayed in place during the 7.1 bloke (and that was a surprise, if you like - that quake was no light ordeal). This time, anything on a north-south wall got thrown down. Luckily, a lot of wargaming stuff above the kitchen cupboards stayed put, else thay would have contributed significantly to the shambles on the kitchen floor.

I haven't heard from Barry Taylor (Erzherzog von Rechburg); nor Paul Jackson (Painting little soldiers) - both will have been in areas harder hit than we have been. St Martins, where Paul lives, is a lot closer to the epicentre of the 6.3 quake and its aftershocks (probably within a kilometre or so - I am about 5 Km from the main swarm). Barry is further off, but in areas that have experienced a lot of liquefaction of subsoils (a very sandy kind of silt underneath the clay). I hope both and their families are OK.

For the rest, it may be a bit of a while before this blogspot again surges into activity.

Cheers,
Ion