It's Easy - in Chinese!

It's Easy - Get prepared for an emergency - now available in Chinese!

We know that English is not always the first language that people speak in our region, but we want everyone to know just how easy it is to prepare for an emergency, so our award-winning preparedness booklet has been translated into Chinese.

Hopefully this will be just the first other language we translate it into, with more languages to come in the future.

Image links to the pdf (960kb)

A quake of our own

Apparently we had an earthquake of our very own today at 8:13 pm.
Moment Magnitude 3.5 (we don't actually use the Richter Scale any more, moment magnitude measures the energy released)
Modified Mercalli 4 (measures the amount of shaking at the surface - effectively the damaged caused, or what people observed to be happening)
Focal depth 33km down, and located 10km North of Porirua.

I didn't feel a thing, did anyone else notice it?

Volcanic Ash - Im in ur airspace, groundin ur planez

For those of you who aren't geeky enough to get the title - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kosmonaut/IM_IN_UR_BASE_KILLIN_UR_D00DZ

Anyway...

Volcanoes are usually on the list of disaster-causing natural hazards that any 6 year old from Titahi Bay School or Cannons Creek School would name. In the earthquakey-lava-erupting sense, they aren't so much of a problem for the Wellington region, though Ruapehu might occasionally ruin your ski season. Our big problem comes from volcanic ash.

From local volcanoes you can get ash coating everything in reach - like this example from near Chaiten in Chile causing serious problems for agriculture.



And then you can get volcanoes in other continents spewing out ash into the atmosphere, which can then be blown across the world, creating a hazard for any aircraft trying to fly through it.

Last year we had an ash cloud thrown up by Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced badly by at least one person as "I'll have a yogurt yurtle"), in Iceland shutting down aircraft travel over much of Europe - costing billion of dollars in lost revenue, and travellers having to work out other ways to get to where they needed to be. Another Icelandic volcano, Grimsvotn, is disrupting their local air traffic right now, and we have the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano in Chile doing exactly the same thing to us, all the way over here in NZ.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5144738/Ash-cloud-too-much-of-a-risk-say-Qantas-Jetstar

Our New Zealand volcanoes would have a similar effect when they decide to erupt next.

Unfortunately for us, Chile's volcanoes put out more ash than Iceland's, so this ash cloud may be disrupting our local air traffic for quite some time yet, so look out for low-flying kiwis trying to stay below it.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/14/us-chile-volcano-idUSTRE75D6QK20110614

Some awesome photos from Chile - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1395070/Thousands-flee-homes-flights-grounded-Chilean-volcano-sends-plumes-ash-showering-down.html

More quakes

I was about to make a post about the volcanic ash problem, but then Christchurch was hit by a series of large aftershocks, the largest at 2:20pm measuring magnitude 6.0, and 8 on the Mercalli scale which measures the intensity of the shaking.

Once again, social media like Twitter and Facebook have been providing rapid reports of what's going on, leaving the news media to play catch-up. The Twitter feed on the article on stuff.co.nz is pretty interesting reading.

First hand reports of the effects of the quakes can be quite vital - and a great way to know that your friends are okay enough to be typing and texting. Sometimes inaccurate information gets forwarded around, so it generally pays to verify that before taking it as gospel.

So far there are reports of more liquefaction, power, phone, & water outages. A few buildings have collapsed, but they were, for the most part, red stickered after the previous quakes. The Red Zone has been expanded back out again, as the already unstable buildings have been further destabilised.

Here in Porirua we're making sure that our staff are ready & able to return to Christchurch to lend a hand like we did after the February quake, or help locally with any regional response.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake/5137773/June-13-quakes-Latest-information

Unlucky Lego Man

Some absolutely fabulous emergency preparedness videos by Chloe & Sophie Crowe from Ngaio School in Wellington.









Fantastic work, guys! I think we could all learn a thing or two from Unlucky Lego Man.

Enjoy Queen's Birthday Weekend

If you are heading out of town for the long weekend, remember to take extra care on the roads. Don't forget, if you get caught driving 5km over the speed limit, you will get a ticket!

The weather looks like it's going to be pretty variable around the country - hopefully it's nice where you're going, but keep an eye on the forecast.

And finally, take survival items for the kids and you on the journey... food, games, drink, blankets (especially for the Desert Road), music and lots of patience.

Water outage Elsdon,Titahi Bay 0800-1200 18/05/11

A large water main feeding into Titahi Bay and Elsdon has ruptured. Those areas and parts of the BD and Ranui may be without water until midday today 18/05/11. Repair crews are on site.

Severe Thunderstorm Watch

A Severe Thunderstorm Watch has been issued which includes the Wellington area

An active front is expected to pass over central New Zealand between midnight and dawn. Thunderstorms are expected to develop on this front. The thunderstorms could be severe, producing gusts of 120km/h, as it crosses over northwest
Nelson, the Outer Marlborough Sounds, northern Wellington, Kapiti Coast, Horowhenua and Taranaki. Wind gusts of this strength can cause some structural damage, including trees and power lines, and may make driving hazardous.

Take care if you are out and about overnight! It may cause more surface flooding as well.

Severe weather

If you haven't just been woken up by that massive rumble of thunder, you may have already noticed that it's been raining a fair bit!

The Fire Service are currently run off their feet dealing with flooding incidents around the region, and there is quite a bit of surface flooding around Porirua, and we can probably expect more as this frontal system moves through over the next few hours.

Hopefully things shouldn't get as bad as they did in the last big rainstorm in Porirua, the tide is going out so shouldn't be causing too many problems with the stormwater outlets, allowing it all to drain away.

If you are having problems with flooding on your property from overflowing stormwater etc, don't forget to call the council - 237-5089 - we can't try to fix what we don't know about - so give us a call, even if you rang us last time as well.

Also take care when driving out there - please don't drive or wade through floodwaters, the wake from your vehicle can cause problems, or it may be too deep and disable your car, and if you are on foot you may not be able to see that a manhole cover has popped and fall in.

Stormwater is often contaminated with sewage, so don't let your kids go playing in it either.

Emergency udpates on Twitter

I've just taken our Twitter account -www.twitter.com/poriruaEMO - off its automatic update from the blog. We'll save it for emergency announcements (and the occassional test message) so that you can sign up to it with your mobile phone and not worry about the other news stories that I might post here.

You can expect to get notifications about Severe Weather Warnings affecting our area, major road closures (if we hear about them in time), things like tsunami warnings, and other big emergency events, and I might post the magnitude and other details for quakes big enough to be felt locally.

If you've got ideas as to what other kinds of notifications you'd like via Twitter, let us know in the comments!