A few days ago was the first anniversary of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand that claimed 185 lives. It's the city where I have lived my whole life, and where my American-born wife came to live 15 years ago. This is a brief note about something unexpected that produced some smiles earlier this week when we commemorated a year since that day.
By the day of the deadly jolt of 22 February 2011, we were used to quakes. The one that started it all - a massive shallow 7.1 in the early hours of a Saturday morning on 4 September 2010 - claimed no fatalities, but left a trail on ongoing aftershocks. In total, counting everything that gets officially registered, we've now had more than ten thousand. I reckon I've probably felt a couple thousand of those. Less than one noticeable tremor a week nowadays, but it was averaging several a day for some months back then.
No one expected anything would approach the intensity of the initial quake, nor take any lives. The fatal earthquake in February was only a 6.3, but measuring a quake only by that number is a bit like measuring the volume of a rectangular box only by its height and ignoring the other two dimensions. The fatal one was very shallow, much closer to the city centre, and caused extremely high peak ground acceleration (PGA) movements. Now, even among the largest earthquakes recorded around the world, few produce a PGA larger than 0.8g (that is, nearly as large as the force of gravity) in the worst-affected locations. For the central business district of Christchurch the fatal February jolt produced a PGA of 1.8g at many sites and an astonishing 2.2 in the highest measurements.
Of the 185 lives lost, more than 100 were in the same building. It contained an English language school, so the families who lost a loved one that day include many from other countries. I didn't know anyone who died in that building, but I knew two of the 185. One worked for the same employer as me, though we'd maybe only spent a total of half an hour in brief conversations the few years we'd both worked there. The other had worked with my father for a couple of decades many years ago.
Anyway, getting to the unexpected happening that prompted me to write these thoughts. The anniversary was a normal work day for me, although we did observe two minutes silence around 12:51 lunchtime in remembrance. One thing I noticed heading to work was that probably half the road cones had small floral bouquets on them.
I should mention that since the quakes, Christchurch has jokingly been named the road cone capital of the world. (That's not to pretend any greater importance than other disaster-affected areas, just a typical bit of local humor.) Even in the less affected suburbs, it is impossible to travel more than half a mile anywhere without seeing some large orange road cones. The type that stand a few feet tall and have silver reflective markings. Yeah, we have a lot of those. They are everywhere, marking areas of road still requiring work and places pedestrians should not walk.
And now half had flowers on top. Some fairly extensive arrangements, others just whatever someone could find growing wild nearby and attach. It turns out someone had drawn a cartoon suggesting the idea; I don't think it had been printed in any paper, but it had spread through social media.
By the time of my commute home that day, most of the cones had adornments.
Next day, it was all of them. Every single one I saw. People didn't want to leave any incomplete, even belatedly. I doubt there was a single publicly accessible road cone in the city without a bouquet on it. Probably even a few inaccessible ones decorated too.
It wasn't just here in the city, either. This was in the local paper the morning after the anniversary:
Flowers sprung out of thousands of road cones all over the world yesterday in a spontaneous act of remembrance for Christchurch earthquake victims.
A cartoon drawn by a Christchurch artist sparked the global remembrance after it was widely shared on social networking sites such as Facebook.
People placed flowers in road cones across Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland and overseas in Australia, London, Singapore and Mexico.
Among the official services marking the anniversary, and the many thousands of locations at workplaces and schools and homes where we congregated at 12:51 to remember in silence that awful time a year ago, and all the other non-fatal earthquakes we've had, I reckon the main thing most of us here in the city will take and remember from this anniversary day will be the road cones.