Hard News: What Now?
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
His “Job” is in Christchurch, his office may be in Wellington but when communications are disrupted he should be close to the emergency, within radio range.
I’ll disagree with Matthew. There’s been a whole system designed to deal with significant disasters such as this, and it’s based around a facility under the beehive.
Uh, that’s not my comment. I was the one saying that even though he could do it from anywhere, John Hamilton should be in Wellington. Steve was the one saying John Hamilton’s place was in Christchurch, getting down and dirty with the front-line troops.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I’m encouraged that the 2nd worst thing to come out of this, after a death toll of 200 people, is not enough toilets to go around. No widespread disease, people not having food, water, violence, looting.
I think it's been a pretty near thing on the disease front, given the toilet situation. We're fortunate that we're a society that widely understands hygiene and sanitation, which mitigates a lot of the risk, but 10 days without toilets is getting very borderline for the continued lack of disease.
Not having had bodies piled in the streets also helps, and we were definitely fortunate to have avoided that particular horror.
As for water, I think we're going to hear in the aftermath that there were some very thirsty people in the east, saved mostly by the charity of others. We've seen articles posted in here that spoke of a serious lack of bulk water delivery in a manner that residents could actually utilise.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Hamilton should be in Wellington. Steve was the one saying Hamilton’s place was in Christchurch
this is too confusing
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Hamilton should be in Wellington. Steve was the one saying Hamilton’s place was in Christchurch
this is too confusing
A big-enough earthquake will fix your geographic dissonance nicely :P
But I've now fixed it.
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nzlemming, in reply to
I was thinking "After all that Christchurch has suffered, Hamilton, too?" ;-)
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Commentor at DimPost makes forceful defense of Brownlee:
Like hell he’s wrong. He’s stuck a big fat finger of realism into the Christchurch eye and rubbed it around a bit. Probably every building in the city was subject to G forces way in excess of the design codes.
So wham, 10,000 houses have to be demolished. Bam, several suburbs will probably have to be relocated. Pow, 100,000 homes damaged. Kapow, 60,000 have fled the city and oh yeah.. several hundred old buildings have to come down to make the inner city safe and encourage people to eventually venture back in there again.
The figures are simply stupendous.. 10,000s home and 30-40,000 people displaced in an instant.. we’ve never come close to that impact in our history! Brownlee is simply the first of many to come to the realisation that Chch is in grave peril of a future unless it gets its priorities right and deals harshly with the puling fools clinging to genteel decay. Christchurch is finished as a major town if it places its past ahead of its future.
JC
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Some disunity in communication - Parker says abandoning damaged suburbs is only "speculation" by Key.
Parker told reporters there may well be 10,000 houses that will need to be rebuilt but geotechnical information is needed before decisions can be made about land remediation.
"But with regard to land remediation and which pieces of land will or may not be rebuilt - and they may all be able to be built on - the simple fact of the matter is anything else until we get that geotechnic information is really speculation and can be very alarming," he said.
"So I want you to relax. When we've got that information those in the affected areas will be the first to know," Parker said.
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Is it possible that rapid demolition of red-stickered properties may be incentivised by contractors getting salvage rights over valuable contents? (h/t Cheryl Bernstein)
In the CBD owners have of course been unable to get independent experts in but decisions are being made to demolish simply because buildings have been red-stickered. The red sticker means they are unsafe to enter as it stands – it should not mean automatic demolition. It involves no judgement as to whether the building could be restored if appropriate shoring up took place. At present owners are being given 24 hours notice that a building is going to be demolished with little possibility of influencing the decision and no chance to recover possessions.
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Another reason behind the demolition of red-stickered buildings is that the demolition companies apparently get the materials and contents as salvage – so we have been informed by an antique shop owner who defied the red stickers (in a suburban area) in order to recover stock ahead of the demolition crews.I will try to get more details to you tomorrow, but it is clear that there are owners who want to restore their buildings but are simply being told they have to come down and that is that.
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Sacha, in reply to
More questioning of Key's numbers.
Official figures released today by Civil Defence tag the number of homes condemned to date in Christchurch at 2190 - about 7800 shy of John Key's estimate of 10,000 - causing some to question where the Prime Minister's office is getting its information.
Although hundreds, if not thousands more houses could be red-stickered (signaling their destruction) as inspectors continue the arduous assessment process in Christchurch, Civil Defence staff were scratching their heads yesterday following Key's update on the earthquake situation.
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Key told reporters Monday that in addition to the 10,000 homes doomed for destruction a further 100,000 were damaged.
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Civil Defence media relations said those figures were inconsistent with their own records as only 70,000 of the 190,000 or so houses in Christchurch have so far been inspected.
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Although hundreds, if not thousands more houses could be red-stickered (signaling their destruction)
A red sticker indicates a building is unsafe to enter. It is not a demolition order.
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He's reported as saying "up to" 10,000 houses in the context of saying that possibly some land may never be worth building on. Hardly a sin.
Although no news source gives his actual words. Seems we're left with speculation filling in a few gaps today.
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Although no news source gives his actual words. Seems we're left with speculation filling in a few gaps today.
Key's words, about 35 seconds in. "Something in the order of 10, 000 homes will need to be demolished".
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Seems fair for the government to be trying to set general public expectations about the scale of this disaster. And you'd expect the local council to be continuing to cheerlead for its area.
However I suspect the tussle over numbers is more a reflection of the broader power struggle between central (Brownlee et al) and local (Parker) government over who calls the shots - and who gets to dole out the pork.
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That's interesting. No-one reported what he actually said. The paraphrasing was sort of accurate but some have taken that to mean Key "said" 10,000 when he intended this to be an estimate of the final total.
Pays to find the actual source.
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Sacha, in reply to
To some extent the facts don't matter to journos aware of that power struggle. We'll probably see other oblique stories about it too.
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However I suspect the tussle over numbers is more a reflection of the broader power struggle between central (Brownlee et al) and local (Parker) government over who calls the shots – and who gets to dole out the pork.
Parker was truly tragic on the news the other night saying that (paraphrased) `you can't sideline local government on this issue'. Did he learn nothing from ECan? I honestly can't believe him sometimes.
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No-one reported what he actually said.
Neil, how much more "reported" can something get than 'on the six o'clock news'?
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Neil Morrison, in reply to
Neil, how much more "reported" can something get than 'on the six o'clock news'?
I was going on the reportage in the print/internet media as quoted above that I searched which all paraphrased, as did the intro to that TV piece.
But I see it's become a tribal politics thing so I'll leave it alone.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
But I see it’s become a tribal politics thing so I’ll leave it alone.
Well, no. You were actually wrong. And the paraphrasing was clearly accurate too. Don't make it someone else's fault.
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About the source of the 10,000 figure (my bolding):
The preliminary figure of around 10,000 was not based on the Civil Defence's process of red stickering houses, Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee said.
He said the preliminary figure was provided by the Earthquake Commission's geotechnical engineers in the first few days after the quake.
Brownlee said a red sticker on a house meant a house was "presently uninhabitable" and that some houses with a red sticker are likely to be repaired.
But Christchurch mayor Bob Parker today responded to Key's comments, saying it was speculation to suggest large areas of land will have to be abandoned because of earthquake damage.
Parker told reporters there may well be 10,000 houses that will need to be rebuilt but geotechnical information is needed before decisions can be made.
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I was wrong? I internet searched and could not find one direct transcript of what he said. I'm just describing what I found.
And I did say that the parahrasing was sort of accurate. But that it was being taken as an exact figure, not an estimate of a possible final total.
It was an observation.
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Question One from parliament today, to the Prime Minister - "Is he satisfied that actions to address the Christchurch earthquake are an adequate response; if not, what are his areas of concern? "
At about 2m into the embedded clip, Key acknowledges that they do not have the relevant geotechnical advice yet.
At about 4m30 there's a supplementary about Brownlee's mindfart about heritage buildings. Key answers that it's not what was said (and of course, being a parliament of honourable gentlemen, gets away with making shit up). Awful lot of that going on right now. Thank goodness for recording devces, eh.
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The prevailing governmental relaxation about accuracy and evidence has sparked the inevitable Twitter meme: #BackofEnvelopeGuess
"The economy will be right, by, oh, I dunno, 2015"
"People who go to food banks probably made some bad choices, yeah, that's probably it"
"Pansy Wong? I heard from a mate she's pretty honest"
etc
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Going back to my original point, I had noticed that it was the paraphrasing of what Key said that was being serially quoted to make various points but internet searching for what he actually said turned up nothing.
That I found interesting and it's not the first time I've noticed that.
One would think that it should be easier to find out what someone said than to find out what someone else said about what they said. But not so.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
To some extent the facts don’t matter to journos aware of that power struggle. We’ll probably see other oblique stories about it too.
And whatever you think of Key and Brownlee (let’s assume the default position around PAS is: nothing nice), is that actually good enough? If journos are going to slide into campaign mode, I’d prefer they do it upfront not passive-aggressively.
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