On Wednesday, 23 February 2011 10:22 Mark said: I hope all our New Zealand Paddlewise members came through the earthquake Mark Appreciate your concern - it's a pretty grim time in Christchurch and we're a small enough community that everyone in the country has friends or relatives down there. I'm safe in Auckland and I know John Kirk-Anderson (also on Paddlewise) is safely alive - from his photos of yesterday's action - Google them. John's a staff photographer for Christchurch's newspaper. Just a year ago in 2010, John was spending a couple of nights at my place in Auckland for our Coastbusters kayaking symposium. At 4 am that day, we got a Civil Defence Alert that an earthquake in Chile was sending a serious Tsunami our way. Chile is about 10,000 km away - so we'd somehow left it out of our risk-assessment plan... John was hugely valuable that day, when we had to rapidly pull together a pre-dawn emergency planning team to cancel the on-the-water day and divert 150 kayakers from the target zone. In 2010, had high tide been at a different time, the surge from the incoming Tsunami (which fortunately turned out to be somewhat less dangerous than originally feared) would still have washed away John's kayaks & boatshed from the shoreline near his home in Christchurch. Little did we think that 2011 would bring something much worse. John has lost one colleague at the paper - when their multi-story office building partially collapsed. I'm hoping that's the extent of it; but I'm not bugging him for details. Everyone down there has a lot on their hands right now. Best Regards Paul Hayward, Auckland, New Zealand *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Feb 23 2011 - 01:26:38 PST
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