We arrived home on Friday night to news of a massive earthquake in New Zealand. We heard this from Louise's brother Adam who lives close to the epicentre in Christchurch. 7.1 on the Richter scale, it happened in the early hours of the morning when Adam was asleep and lasted almost a minute. Homes and commercial property were destroyed - the restaurant across the road from Adam's house collapsed. Fears of an ensuing Tsunami drove people out to their cars to seek higher ground. The roads were soon jammed. Adam couldn't get his own car out of the garage because the power was cut and the electric garage door was jammed. His girlfriend was away from home visiting friends in another part of the country and Adam couldn't reach her on the phone. He could however call his parents and family, 12,000 miles away, who were able to offer moral support and a friendly voice when he needed to hear it most. He also acted on their advice to take food and warm clothing / blankets with him... though when he calmed down later, he realised all he'd actually managed to grab was a pillow and a jar of gherkins.
While Louise spoke to her brother and her family, I searched the news for updates. Did I find any? The BBC? Sky News? Teletext? None of them were even mentioning it. I turned on the ITV evening news to find a large segment taken up promoting ITV's new breakfast TV service which will be replacing GMTV from today. In other words, an advert. We supposedly live in a 24 hour rolling news society, yet all this actually means is the same three stories rotating ad infinitum. Apparently some government advisor is being accused of phone tapping. That's pretty scandalous (though not as scandalous as the idea of former News Of The World editor working in a key government position in the first place), but it's the sort of story the media go overboard on because it's about The Media. After I'd heard the same soundbites five times with no mention of a disaster in a country that, though on the other side of the world, still has a major expat community, I gave up on the TV. Oh, and William Hague might or might not be gay. Who cares, British news media? They did eventually get round to reporting the story 24 hours later (when they had some nice pictures to show), but it was hardly breaking news by then.
Fortunately, the blogging community is far better at reporting current events. Many thanks to The Sagittarian for her updates. Best wishes to her and any other Kiwis who may be reading this.
