Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water

So a week ago, it's Friday afternoon, and I'm at my desk, the aftershocks from last month's quakes have pretty much died away and things have been feeling normal in that regard for a little bit, when this bad boy happens, and suddenly I'm under my desk waiting for it to stop. Which seemed to take ages. This was the first of the recent series I have felt somewhere other than at home, and away from the bedrock of that locale it was a lot more intense. That was the first time I've ever for real jumped under a desk or table in an earthquake. And I'd do it a couple more times that afternoon as more aftershocks came through. Not fun.

Well this is getting old

Hot on the heels of Friday's rocking and rolling, we have had today's memorable events.
This bad boy in the morning woke me from a doze to wonder if one of the girls was jumping on the bed (something it took about a second to realise couldn't be true), before waking up and heading to the doorframe to join the rest of the family.

Screengrab via Geonet.org.nz

Then right on tea-time it's bigger brother showed up.

Screengrab via Geonet.org.nz

I was just walking out the back-door to bring in the washing when it kicked off. I ran back in to fetch Sophie from the lounge (who at 2 seems impervious to the shakes so far), and paused in the lounge doorway to wait and see what was happening. A cry from upstairs revealed that Charlotte (who at 4 is not quite so ambivalent as her sister) had been woken from her nap and was most displeased at the house going all wobbly again. Fi had now appeared in an adjacent doorframe, so thrusting/throwing Sophie at her I ran upstairs to meet Charlotte coming down. Second babe in hand I went back down and waited for the shaking to stop. While our heartrates settled down, a plan was hatched to sort out who goes for what babe in future, and Charlotte instructed to wait for us in a safe place. Just in time for the aftershock about five minutes later

I've discovered that the big slab of peneplain my house sits on manages to insulate us from most things below a 5.0 or so in this sequence, so we've been spared most of the aftershocks, and the worst of the main shocks. The damage around the city though is of a kind I don't recall seeing here in my lifetime, with at least one person I know having their inner city apartment trashed, and the CBD closed for inspection until at least noon. The preliminary report from GNS gives a 1 in 3 chance of a similar size quake within the next week, and a 1 in 5 for the next 24 hours. That's not encouraging.

Post script: On pondering what the shakes actually feel like, and it feels obvious to say it, the big shakes have a palpably different feel to them. They aren't just little shakes writ large. They have more heft, more bass (the bass component is a wierd one to explain), more everything. The little ones tease with the possibility they may get bigger. The big ones leave no doubt they mean business.

Nice Day for an Earthquake

And it was. Blue skies, sunshine, light winds.

And a shallow 5.7 out in Cook Strait. News link with awesome koiwoi ucksents here.

And after a friend of mine suggested this track on facebook, I'm shamelessly stealing it. Dodgy quality but one of my favourite videos in one of my favourite places (Te Mata Peak in the Hawkes Bay). Seems appropriate:

The goat that ate Wellington

This time last month, I looked out my office window, saw the wind turn to the south and posted this on facebook in anticipation of the weather that had been forecast:


And then for about 24 hours nothing happened. But while it was calm for now, out in Cook Strait a stormy goat was arising. A very ANGRY goat.

 Screenshot from the metservice rain radar on the night of 20th June.

Besides the forecast, the big hint that something out of the ordinary was up was an email to my worksite from the electricity distribution company saying that not only were they anticipating the possibility of power cuts that night, they were expecting them. Just before heading home after a calm day, I looked out the window and noticed the clouds I could see were suddenly moving a lot quicker. When I walked out to the car the wind was picking up bluster, and by dinnertime an hour later it was violent. My place is slightly sheltered from the predominant northwest and southerly gales, but this one was out of the southwest, and shaking the house with every gust, gusts I could occasionally hear roaring up the hill toward us. And then it just built and built.

Mid evening I took a screenshot of current conditions from metservice, which showed the wind had shifted to the south and was now averaging just over one hundred kilometres per hour. I've never seen it like this, equivalent to a category 1 hurricane (and if that is a weak hurricane, I'm glad I don't live somewhere where strong ones happen). Up on Mount Kaukau above the city there was a gust of more than two hundred.

Around about this time the Kaitaki Interislander broke it's moorings after a particularly strong gust and went for a wander around the harbour, while roofs, trees and fences did the same all over the region, and the sea rose up and smashed south facing beaches in the face. I'd like to say I had some heroic storm stories about battening down this, or rescuing that but I don't. I went out for a careful look around the main street of my suburb to see what was going on, saw the blacked-out suburbs in the valley below, then just sat in my study and watched the storm unfold on-line, while listening to the roar of wind and rain and watching the glass on the windows bending inwards to a degree I had never seen before. Then forcing myself to not watch the glass bending in.

Watching it on social and news media was interesting as a collective experience, as stories and events were relayed in real-time. Before this era you just hunkered down and waited until it blew over to find out what had happened, maybe keeping up with whatever made it to the radio. Now you know what's going on as it happens, including those using their phones to stay on-line after their power dropped out.Watching one suburb after another around us (but not us, since the power lines in my suburb are underground) lose power it occurred to me that this was the worst storm since at least the mid-80's. That storm in 1985 I remember waking up to dad cooking breakfast on a camp stove on top of the dead oven. As it turns out it was one of the worst in 50 years, breaking into that rare category of being genuinely comparable to the Wellington storm that is still the yardstick that local people compare storms to.

We suffered no damage at our place, but a house around the corner from us suddenly found it's roof sitting in the street instead of atop the walls. The possibility of unwelcome things happening to my house though kept me up until I saw the winds start to abate a little to regular storm strength. After that it was just a case of waiting until morning to see what the storm hath wrought.

Thinking of this song a lot at the moment :)

It was funny to note the change in wording of the electronic billboards after our non drought ending rain last week too :).

People are actually taking it seriously which is good to see, including the guy at the car yard who apologised for our new car not being washed before we took delivery of it.

Big Dry/Big Wet

After an epic unbroken run of nearly two weeks of clear skies, warm temperatures and no rain that saw us heading to the beach more times in the space of a week than we did for the entirety of last summer, on Sunday night the thickening clouds to the west, and a palpable increase in humidity suggested rain was on the way.

And on Monday it did, making up for lost time by delivering a month's worth of rain overnight. I was out on the motorway at the height of the deluge and it was some of the worst rain I have ever driven in. The 18-wheeler tailgating me so close all I could see in my rearview mirror was radiator grille merely added to the fun. When the warm front from the north eased off, a cold front from the south ramped it back up again. For a while the road outside my place looked more like a waterslide.

Christmas and all that

Listening to: Explosions In The Sky - Those who tell the truth shall die (2001).

The Christmas break was a blast. The only problem with getting into the "what day of the week is it?" holiday mode, is that all of a sudden you realise its Sunday, the Sunday before the Monday you go back to work (today).

Christmas Day was cool, the decorated trees (props to my sister for coming up with that) outside the family house heralding a great gathering for lunch, presents and hanging out.

It was also hot and calm, the hottest day in Wellington for a long time (and the second hottest Christmas day since records began). It was certainly the hottest I have ever seen on my backyard thermometer of ish in the six years we have had it:

The heat induced both post Christmas lunch siestas and beautiful thundery cumulonimbus clouds popping up over the ranges:

By evening it still hadn't cooled off much so we headed to my favourite local beach for a paddle. Depite the promise of ice-cream the girls conked out in the car. They quickly revived though once they realised more fun was to be had.

Even at 8pm the the beach was still alive, with people still hitting the water even as the sun set (I went for a swim, it was blissful).

Perfect end to a perfect day.

Muggy Christmas

 It's Christmas Eve and Cristmas trees of various persuasions are blooming:

And after wreaking havoc in Samoa and Fiji, what's left of Cyclone Evan gave us a couple of early christmas presents in the form of yesterdays humid fogpocalypse (of which there is an awesome pic on facebook here), which wasn't altogether welcome:

 And a 30+ degree day today (seen here at my place at 4pm in the shade), which was.

 So from Wellington, Happy Christmas wherever you are :)

PS it's an Earthquake

So about this time last night, I'm sitting at my workbench in the study, Fi is pottering in the kitchen, and the kids are asleep upstairs. All is quiet when the model shelves beside me start rattling. They do that from time to time in response to low frequency noises like passing vehicles, the washing machine, or earthquakes. Whenever they start their noisemaking my earthquake spidey senses go all a-tingle, but they usually stop after a second or two and I go back to whatever I was doing. This time they don't stop.

After taking a second or two to tune in I notice that we are indeed rocking gently to and fro, and having an earthquake. After discussing this with friends later we'll figure out this was the P wave arriving and doing it's thing. The whole P and S wave (link) aspect of earthquakes is something I learned years ago but haven't thought about for a while and we're about to get a reminder of how they work.

I note the time for later reference, and that Fi hasn't said anything, so I calmly call out "earthquake" to the kitchen without leaving my seat. She doesn't hear me, so I call out again, and this time she responds by rushing to the doorway and urging me to do the same. That I have time to call out twice isn't something I notice at the time, but in hindsight it means the tremor has already gone on longer than usual. It hasn't got much worse yet and I'm thinking it's a pretty good nudge, (but not that bad) but it will probably end in a few seconds so I'll see what it does and ride it out. Fi is a little less blase, and getting insistent, so I get up and head to the doorway.

I've just gotten to the doorframe when the S waves start arriving and the shaking really kicks off, the worst we've ever experienced in this house. Fi suggests we head upstairs to get the kids, but I'm still thinking this will only go for a few more seconds (ignoring the fact that this is already one of the longest tremors I've ever experienced), so again suggest we ride it out. That's when the shaking kicks up another notch, we hear something glass fall over in the kitchen (later determined to be empty beer bottles in the recycling), the house starts creaking and we are both heading upstairs to rescue the little ones. Quite what we would do if the house started collapsing at this point I haven't figured out, especially having just left a spot of relative safety, but parental instinct is a great driver. We've just gotten to the top of the stairs and are about to go charging into the girl's bedroom to grab one each when the shaking eases and stops, followed by that wierd period when you aren't quite sure if the shaking really has stopped, or your adrenalised senses are tricking you into thinking it is still going.

Having determined that the land has returned to a state of quiescence, we look into the girl's room and immediately have to drop our voices as we calm each other down. The bebes slept through the whole thing. One of them may have rolled over, but that is all :).

It turns out to have been a deep magnitude 7.0, which is starting to get up there in terms of destructive potential, but luckily the depth mitigated it a bit. A much lesser magnitude, but many times shallower tremor wrought all the havoc in Christchurch last year.

There's a Geonet backgrounder here, with the Geonet quake report proper here.

And if you want to hear what it sounded like in a Wellington church, the earthquake was captured during a recording session here (lasting a lot longer than I realised at the time).

It was a doozy.

Under The Mountain

Theme song for this post: Going Underground

We marked ANZAC day on Wednesday by going to a mid-morning remembrance service, visiting a friends for (their) birthday tea and scones, then going up to Wright's Hill Fortress in Karori for a wander in the afternoon. ANZAC Day also marks 13 years since Fi and I got together, so it was nice to do something as a family. We finished up by having a mini-picnic (cupcakes and raspberry buns) on the lawn outside the entrance :)

I've been to the fortress a few times now, and while it is interesting to see how the restoration is going (especially compared to the first time I visited it in 1989), it can be a bit creepy knowing just how enclosed you are (besides it not being a particularly welcoming place in general). It still impresses me how hidden it is. Aside from the long empty gun-pits on the surface (in a nice piece of irony, the guns and turrets were sold post-war to the Japanese the place was built to defend Wellington from), and the external access portals, there is little hint of what lies below the summit of the hill.

Charlotte liked the wetas especially. The cool and dark is a perfect environment for them:

It is open about five times a year, and worth checking out by any Wellingtonians interested in the history of their city.

NB this post was meant to go up a few days ago, but I ran into some problems with bloggers new photo uploader insisting the images I saved in portrait were really meant to be in landscape, and thus posting everything sideways. Not an improvement when the old one never had any issues with it.

Not just me

Turns out it wasn't just my opinion: the summer really did officially suck. Even NIWA thinks so:

A Summer in name only

21% less sunshine hours than average and no hot days. Seems about right. Out here in the Hutt we are usually 1 or 2 degrees warmer than Wellington, but there were still few 'wow it's summer' days.

On a slightly more whimsical note, I noticed this in Wellington yesterday mid-weather bomb:
It could be worse.

Our place is on a north-facing slope, so we in our spending most of the day at home we missed the worst the storm could deliver locally. Driving into the city in the early evening though was an interesting experience, with rain so heavy we had to slow to close to half the speed limit, not because of flooding, but because we just couldn't see the road ahead. Wind by that time had dropped to about average for a southerly storm around here.

Christmas Day Cruise

Something I used to do when I first learned to drive was go for a cruise around the eastern bays of Wellington Harbour at the end of Christmas day. It was a nice way to wind down after a usually busy afternoon, and it was a nice vibe to see people still out and about doing the same.

Gradually though, Christmas got busier, and my little tradition fell by the wayside for a few years, not least because I a: started being allowed to drink at the family Christmas bash, and b: I married into a family that has Christmas dinners rather than the lunches that mine does.

This year though, we found ourselves with time on our hands at the end of the day, and everyone still awake, so the girls and I piled into the car and resurrected the cruise, starting with a lazy meal of chinese takeaways at Petone Beach.

The evening was warm, still, and perfect.

Charlotte on the sea wall at Petone:
Sunset from near the harbour entrance at Eastbourne:
Wellington Harbour from Eastbourne as the lights come on:
Including a big Christmas tree across the harbour entrance:
Days Bay wharf at dusk.

At least it isn't "Wellywood"

(image sourced from Stuff.co.nz)

So the people have spoken (sort of, since "No Sign" wasn't an option in the public vote), and "Blown away" will soon be adorning the hill at the northern end of the airport. The crowd isn't exactly going wild.

It isn't the option I voted for, and I don't really like it. It plays to and reinforces an outsider's and negative stereotype of the city (tellingly it was designed by people based in Auckland), and just seems a bit meh. It does tie in to the nearby collection of kinetic sculptures, and isn't the godawful cringe that "Wellywood" would have been, but that is about all the good things I can say about it. Uninspiring.

The second alternative option "Eye of the Taniwha", I thought was much better, not only being more creative and actually designed by a Wellingtonian, but also specific to its exact location.

(image sourced from Stuff.co.nz)

In explaining it you could have told a great story, how Ngake the Taniwha escaped to the sea, while poor Whataitai got stuck (link). I would have loved relating that to visitors.

With "Blown Away" pretty much all you get to say is "Yeah, it gets a bit windy sometimes".

Who knows, it might grow on me and be affectionately regarded one day.

Meanwhile, in another part of town, the Ian Curtis graffiti I've blogged about here and there is doing a good cheshire cat impersonation (link).

Guy Fawkes

Shots from the crowd on the waterfront of the annual November 5th public fireworks display last Saturday night:

Lights over Wellington

More or less coincident with the World Cup, bright lights have been piercing the skies above our fair city. I thought it was something to do with the event itself, but after a bit of digging I found it sort of is and isn't.

It is a promotion for Victoria University (press blurb here), with a light shining from each of their campuses around the city.

With the right cloud base the effect can be quite striking:



No reports of Bat-signals have been noted, although something similar in Christchurch last month prompted someone in a Batman costume to turn up at the local copshop and ask to see 'the Commissioner'.

On a vaguely related note, while the Stadium is still helpfully labelled as such, last night while driving past it I noticed the the 'T' in the lettering wasn't lighting up. This turned the title into "SADIUM", which made me wonder if there was hopefully a "HAPPIUM" out there somewhere.

Communistical sculpture

Listening to: the sound of my children sleeping. Or occasionally grizzling.

So a couple of months ago I blogged about the Wellington Odd Shaped Ball tournament commemorative statue, and how I thought it was a bit communist-y.

Turns out I'm not the only one who thought that as noted by The Wellingtonista here, and the style even has a name, although to be fair in a post eerily similar at times to mine, Wellingtonista's scribe did note a few things I didn't, most notably a certain feminine aspect to the piece. I won't be able to look at it the same way again, although the observation does remind me of this scene from The Big Lebowski, which works just as well in Italian as it did in English.

The hopes of one of the sculptors that people might climb on it being summarily vetoed by an anonymous council operative fits nicely with the totalitarian imagery too.

In The Navy....

No disrespect intended to the Royal New Zealand Navy, but that song always comes to mind when the subject comes up. Not so much due to The Village People as it is to these guys:

The whole idea of Vikings singing this song in their longboats cracks me up.

Anyway, back to the actual Navy, the Navy was in Wellington over the weekend to mark their 70th anniversary. And when I say "the Navy", I mean literally the entire fleet bar one ship. Not often you can get almost the entire navy in one shot. There are nine RNZN ships out of twelve in this pic, with another couple berthed around the corner to the right:
The aforementioned couple, Fleet Replenishment Tanker HMNZS Endeavour and Survey and Research ship HMNZS Resolution, along with the just returned from being upgraded Interisland Ferry Aratere.
Sealift and Amphibious Support Vessel HMNZS Canterbury at Queen's Wharf (middle), with Inshore Patrol Vessels HMNZS Taupo and Rotoiti (left) and Hawea and Pukaki (right):
Offshore Patrol Vessel HMNZS Wellington:
ANZAC/Meko 200 class Frigate HMNZS Te Mana, and OPV HMNZS Otago:
The other half of the combat element, HMNZS Te Kaha. That we only have two instead of four of these was one of the bigger NZ public spending controversies of the early 90's.
Te Kaha with Canterbury behind. Charlotte was concerned that the big gun might frighten people:
Te Kaha from astern:
Te Kaha's Phalanx Close In Weapons System for self defense. A bit like R2D2, but less cute:
The girls and I went for a wander amongst the crowds and ships around the waterfront on Saturday morning. Charlotte liked the helicopters (both Naval and Civilian) best. Combined with the World Cup games at the nearby stadium (we ran into the All Blacks leaving a signing session just as we got there) it was a busy weekend in the city. With all the overseas visitors here for the tournament, there has been a nice buzzier than usual atmosphere around town.

Reports that much of the buzz was from excited singles reacting to the sudden appearance of hundreds of sailors wandering around in uniform are unconfirmed :).

Along with most of the ships being open to visitors, Helipro was conducting operations as normal from it's Queens Wharf base. Small helicopter (Robinson R44), big ship (Canterbury):
Slightly bigger helicopter (Eurocopter Twin Squirrel), still a big ship:
While the crowds waited to board the Canterbury, they could check out Helipro's BK-117 which was opened up for inspection (and which can be seen hard at work in this post ). It made an interesting contrast with the Navy SH-2G Seasprite embarked aboard the Canterbury.
Three helicopters in one shot. R44, Jetranger, and Te Kaha's Seasprite
The Navy has since left Wellington to go back to their usual ports and duties. Before they sailed the stood out into the harbour yesterday so they could be inspected by the Governor General. I happened to drive into town in the evening and they made for a moody and impressive sight looming out of the heavy rain in the gathering twilight.

It would have made a great photo, but I didn't have my camera with me (plus I was driving along the motorway at the time, which is probably more critical).