Munted is a polite way for NZers to say f*cked, destroyed, wasted. It's typical of the understated way that NZers describe big things.
This has been the assessment over and over the last few days. I received an e-mail from a friend who works at the Port of Lyttleton, at the epicentre of the quake. His e-mail said "Family fine, port is munted".
The Mayor of Christchurch described the water and sewerage systems as "most definitely munted".
You see buildings on TV and say "Wow, that one's munted".
Watching the news is a little like watching your life go by - "There's where I get my hair cut." "There's where our pictures are being framed." "That was my favorite restaurant." (All true - we saw the place where we left some pictures to be framed last month - the awning in front of the store was on the ground covered with bricks. It will be weeks before we find out whether there is anything left of the shop). PGL, you won't recognise the place you visited a few years ago. It was pretty bad after September, now it's just - well, munted.
I planned to come home for the weekend, I would have arrived last night. However Wednesday morning they put on more flights in and out the the city, so I changed my flight to be home with the Kiwi.
The Kiwi was on her way to Rangiora to see a client when the big one struck. Driving. She says that the car and the occupants were rocking so violently that she really thought the car would fall over. As a result, she has something like whiplash. Not surprising since they said that the location plus shallowness of the quake created a ground accelleration equal to 1+ G. That's more than one time the force of gravity. I was able to talk to her just after the big one struck, before we knew how big it was. Then she called me back a few minutes later to tell me what she was going to do. That was the last time we spoke for several hours.
Everyone is an expert at keeping an eye on the Geo Net and Canterbury Quake Live sites (http://quake.crowe.co.nz/.) After 4000 + aftershocks, people are pretty good at guessing magnitudes too. There's a Twitterfeed called #aftershockpoker just for that purpose - guessing the magnitude. Since I wasn't here to feel it first hand, I could tell how big it was by the activity on Twitter. Normally the tweets in #eqnz are fairly benign - "Felt that one out in Hornby, cat jumped off the bed". These tweets were scary from the beginning - "Cathedral spire is on the ground", "CTV building on fire". They just got worse.
I spent about an hour with a couple that are from Christchurch and have family here - we all sat in an office watching the news feed and trying to call and text people, but by then the phone lines were completely jammed. They were so jammed that 111 (Emergency) calls weren't going through at one point. They were telling people to stop using their phones all over the country to try to alleviate the strain on the networks.
Anyway, it took the Kiwi four hours to drive what normally takes about 25 minutes, to get back to the office to get her car, and then another couple hours to get home. The roads were flooded, broken, traffic terrible. And the whole time they are driving there were really big aftershocks every few minutes. She said you could see the road moving sometimes.
This wasn't as big as the September quake, which was much closer to our house, and which terrified us. Because it was shallow and closer to the City, it has brought down dozens of buildings already, many of which were already significantly weakened from the big one and months of aftershocks. The streets are flooded with liquefaction, which is where the sand and water in the ground form into volcanoes and shoot up to the surface. You'll see grey mounds of dirt in fields, that's the result of liquefaction. They say it's like quicksand. And there are tons of it in some neighborhoods.
Our house is fine this time because we are pretty far from the epicentre. We never lost power or water. Yesterday a friend came over to have a shower and get some water as they don't have much in the city and it has to be boiled before you can drink it.
Today the Kiwi is at work at the hospital. She normally works in the community visiting people, but now they are helping feed patients and getting them into bed. She's going to be home late tonight and has to work on the weekend as well. They're desperate for staff. The amazing thing is that many people who are working right now have lost their homes, cars, don't know where people are, and they still keep working. It's good to have something to do at times like this I guess.
After the initial worry of not knowing where family and friends are (well some people won't know that for some time) it's starting to sink in how bad this is. It's sad - people have been through a hell of a lot already, lost things, forced out of their homes, etc., and just when it started to seem like things were getting better, the worst possible thing has happened. There are only 350,000 people in Christchurch - it's a relatively small town. No one will be unaffected. The next few months are really going to suck. This quake will have its own series of aftershocks. Yesterday at midday there had been 65 quakes in the past 24 hours.
We have been lucky. We have been through a lot of things in the past year besides earthquakes, and we often say to ourselves how lucky we truly are. We're ok, we have a house we can live in, our family is ok, we have jobs, etc. It's heartbreaking to watch what people are having to go through. Munted.
