Hey y'all

I live in Christchurch, and life here hasn't been a lot of fun lately. But I have learned a few things about coping with a natural disaster. One of the things that don't seem to get mentioned much is the aftershocks. Since the magnitude 7.1 earthquake in September, we've had more than 4000 aftershocks. We were getting at least one magnitude 5 quake every month and they were still causing damage. The damage caused by the Feb 22nd quake last week actually stemmed from 3 shallow quakes within about 15 minutes. The ground acceleration was 2.2 G. The building code here is for 1.8 G at most. You can literally see the ground moving when you're outside - some of the aftershocks were violent enough to knock us off our feet.

Anyway, some things I have learned:
1. Storing 3 days supply of water is not enough. Even reserving it for drinking, we seemed to go through it faster than expected. Had to put the chickens on tight rations, before the water tanker got to our area.
2. If you're planning on using your hot water cylinder as a source of water in an emergency, make sure it can be drained even if the mains water supply is out. Our new cylinder was installed 3 days before the quake (old one got cracked in the September quake). It won't drain if there's no water going in to it. I assume that's to stop the heating element from burning out if the cylinder got drained while the element was still on. There's probably a way to drain it manually, but with the violence of the aftershocks no-one is going up in the roof space to find out.
3. As well as storing water, keep some clean empty bottles too. That way when a source of water is located, you've got something to put them in. Or you can give them to the friends and family who ignore all the constant public service messages about how to prepare for a disaster, and find themselves queuing at the water tanker with nothing but a dirty mop bucket.
4. And speaking of which, you can never have too many buckets. Make sure your collection includes one big enough for an adult to stand in - you can use that for washing yourself, clothes, the baby etc. Remember that if water isn't coming into your place, chances are you may also be having trouble getting rid of waste water. Our street is humped up outside and liquefaction has caused pipe damage so the sewer is backing up. So we're trying not to put much down the plughole. Have a few lidded buckets too, good for emergency toilets. A good big bowl is useful for washing dishes too.
5. Chances are the cellphone networks are going to be jammed within 5 minutes of a sudden disaster. That's what happened to us, text messages weren't going through, or took hours to get through and arrived out of order. One change I'm going to make is add contacts to an emergency notifications group on my phone so I can send one brief message to everyone as fast as possible. Cell phones did help save the lives of some people trapped in collapsed buildings. Something else I found out was that if the cell phone towers near you go out, your phone chews through a lot of battery power connecting to the next nearest tower. People's phone batteries ran down very fast.
6. Just because you have a car doesn't mean you're going anywhere in a hurry. Much of the city was completely gridlocked within 15 minutes of the quake.
7. Don't underestimate your emotional and mental response to a disaster. Frequent violent aftershocks which have been going on for months here, really make everyone anxious. I think the only other situation you could compare it to would be living in a war zone. The aftershocks can mean very little sleep for many days (they were coming every 15 minutes all night last week). This really does take a toll on your mental state, and your health. Your short term memory starts to go - we call it "earthquake brain" here when someone can't seem to focus on anything. Results in very poor driving

So I'm going to give us an 8/10 on disaster preparation this time around. 3 days supply of water - check, but should have stored more. Several months supply of food - check (got downright embarrassing when people keep trying to give us stuff - the only thing I ran out of was chocolate). Back up means of cooking and boiling water - check. But I should have done some trial runs with the thermette (volcano kettle). Campfire cooking takes some practice. Emergency toileting - gotta work on that one, having a backyard overlooked by the neighbours is not helpful. Solar camping shower - check, very useful, but nothing strong enough to hang it on in the bathroom, might put a heavy duty hook in there. Tent, so we could sleep on the lawn when the house was shaking - nope, still haven't got around to that one, thought it was overkill. Might rethink that one now