March the 20th of 2011

I suppose I should do this. Because tomorrow I may not be here. I may be crushed under some building. If the predicated massive earthquake in Canterbury happens.

I'll be the first to admit. If I'm lying buried under rubble tomorrow, I'll be slapping my head (if I can reach it) and saying "Shit, shit, shit". And I'll be gutted that Ken Ring was right. I will be kicking myself as well as I wouldn't have changed anything I regularly do - as if anyone in Christchurch is doing what they regularly do at the moment. Because of my stubborn intention to not change anything I might do, I'm not expecting anything out of our current ordinary to change drastically.

However, I'll go out on a limb. I predict we will have an aftershock tomorrow. I also predict that I may put in a case for a new mountain bike given the current topography of Christchurch roads and bike tracks. I also predict that I may finish my book. I'm also predicting that I still won't know where I'm supposed to turn up to work on Monday.

I don't think Ken Ring fully understood the affect his prediction would have had. He just spouted off the date of when it would happen quite knowingly. To be fair to him, that was after the 4 September earthquake, where no lives had been lost. Things have changed drastically since then. Any smugness that we had all survived a massive earthquake has well and truly been smashed. I don't think the 4 September t-shirts will be worn for a while. There certainly will be no market for surviving 22 February t-shirts.

Many people are so terrified they will take any prediction as certainty. Others are leaving town, just to be sure. It is after all, around the time a big aftershock is expected. Prior to 22 February, a big aftershock was expected every four to five weeks. It is nearly four weeks since the 6.3 earthquake. I have neighbours who have taken off to Auckland for the weekend and when I spoke to one of them as we went to school to pick up our children, she had family pressure to leave town for a bit. As we talked about it more, she conceded that she knew the science and didn't really believe in the prediction. But even as a non-believer in the Ken Ring prediction, nobody can condemn anybody who wants to get out of town for the weekend. Just to be sure.

The city's morale is low. Many are terrified. A great many of us in Christchurch have had loss. Christchurch is a small place. You do not have to look through the list of people who died long to see someone you know. Personally I've seen four names - two of those people I knew well enough to talk to. You can be talking within a small group of people and inevitably someone will say something like their wife's cousin was killed in the earthquake.

In a disaster, people generally revert to a state similar to someone in shock. This condition is detailed in Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine". What her point is in the book is many governments usually push through unpopular reforms at this time, or they take advantage of the lapse in attention of the population to redevelop areas devastated by a disaster to a standard demanded by their campaign contributors. At this stage many Christchurch people are in that shocked state. What may seem absurd, now seems like reason.

What it really comes down to is if anyone chose to leave town this weekend, who would blame them given our mental states at the moment. If I'm under trapped under something tomorrow, I will probably consider them visionary.