Required But Not Sufficient: Banning Semi-automatic Firearms

Following the Christchurch Mosque shootings politicians are calling for banning private ownership of semi-automatic weapons.

I agree that they should be banned but believe we need much much more. Simply banning semi-automatics without ending the underlying causes of the shootings is just saying "It's OK to murder 25 Muslims but not 50"

The Future of Christchurch?

The rescue operation is over. The end of recovery operation is in sight. The news media has long ended its  continuous coverage and the tone has changed from sharing our shock and reporting heroism to looking for scapegoats.

Christchurch residents are either working around the problems they are facing or are moving out of town.  Some are virtual refugees others have simply expedited already planned moves or for younger people gone on their OE to England a little earlier than they may have.

Meanwhile the centre of Christchurch is still cordoned off, but businesses have been given limited access to much of it to recover computers and vital business records. Thousands of homes have no water or sewerage and the Mayor of Christchurch used part of his press conference to talk about using chemical toilets.

Predictions are that at least ten thousand homes will have to be demolished and rebuilt and there are suggestions that entire suburbs will have to be abandoned because of the liquefaction problems so new land will be needed to build on. The Treasury has estimated that the total cost of the earthquake will be around 15 billion dollars and will take more than 4 years to rebuild Christchurch.

Meanwhile, Auckland has a large number of empty offices and shops, and builders are putting up more of these all the time only increasing presure. Every time I pass a building site, I think it would be wonderful if we could find a way to move the builders down to Canterbury, obviously someone would need to cover the out-of-pocket expenses of having them work remotely while having their homes here but I'm sure that problem can be solved.

Longer term, Christchurch will rebuild, but it's going to be a long hard slog and in the meanwhile they will need support and assistance from the rest of New Zealand.

Christchurch Earthquake Community Response

A dedicated volunteer team of Internet people, web masters, programmers, and computer capable helpers have built the New Zealand Christchurch Earthquake Community Response site to coordinate help efforts.

Anyone who needs help because of the earthquake or who can offer help should go there.

Headless Chickens of the Apocalypse

Yep, that's me too. In the wake of the 22 February earthquake I officially nominate myself as a headless chicken of the apocalypse

For the benefit of archaeologists reading this in 1,000 years time, it's now 2 days since a 6.3 magnitude earthquake went off under Christchurch, killing at least 75 people (possibly as many as 300), demolishing buildings and destroying the water supply of NZ's second largest city.

On Monday, like many New Zealanders, I watched the continuous TV coverage in stunned silence. On Tuesday, along with thousands of others I asked myself "What can I do to help?". I can't do much, but I do have internet assets so I decided I could make a list of available services. Emergency services, contact services, etc. I reasoned it shouldn't require much infrastructure so I threw up a page on my personal blog. I then discovered that there are a lot of people out there creating internet resources to help and there is quite a bit of duplication. I don't want to pick winners so I listed everything I found. Eventually the page grew to the point where the blogger editior was unhappy with the nested blockquote / bulletpoint format I chose and started grinding to a halt.

Then I had my headless chicken moment. "I'll start a new blog" I said. I was alone, so nobody said "No, you fool, there are already enough blogs" so my Christchurch Earthquake Resources Blog was born. I placed it on a domain name I already had and made it with Wordpress. Why Wordpress? I don't know how to use wordpress. Why even a blog? I'm building a directory ... in retrospect I think it's because I already had a single blog page.

I worked on this for a couple of hours til around midnight & went to bed. This morning when I woke up I was a bit more logical and said "Julia, you make directories. You've got 9 of them, this is a collection of links, why not make a directory?" so 5 minutes later I had my Christchurch Earthquake Resources Links Directory set up and 10 minutes after that I had the links duplicated. I now have the blog page, the blog and the directory ... I think I'll leave them all up for now until I work out how to glue my head back on.

On the plus side, I now have a useful list of resources for peole needing help with canterbury or wanting to offer help. The red cross website has been overloaded since the earthquake. A posting of mine about this found someone who has plenty of bandwidth and is now trying to contact them to offer help (Their phones are overloaded too).

 The moral of this story, are

1. To help, pick something you actually know how to do
2. Don't rush in before you're sure it's the best thing you can do
3. Don't unnecessarily duplicate other people' efforts. Check sites like mine first and try googling. This is so new that the search engines may not have caught up, but at least try.
4. Do tell me & others with similar lists about your sites
5. Do co-ordinate with others who can help.

Julia