A big happy birthday Dave & have fun with the goal setting :-) Cheers,
Christine
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Mann" <[email protected]>
To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 3:44 AM
Subject: Quake: 3 weeks later
Hi all,
I have a few spare moments so I thought I might write an update on how
things are going here. I've been quiet lately but for good reasons,
things have been settling down and slowly returning towards normality.
Last Monday we moved into a temporary office. The building that houses
our usual office sustained a lot of water damage after the earthquake
activated the sprinkler system. The boss has been trying to get out of
the lease (for this and other reasons) but it looks like they'll have it
ready for use soon, possibly this coming week.
The temporary office space is working fairly well, except for the
distractions of having everyone together in the same room. The only major
annoyance is the IT situation; our main office server is still in its
temporary location and it's very slow to access files over the VPN
connection.
We are still getting aftershocks. The biggest ones are about magnitude
4.5 and we'd be getting maybe one or two of those a day with a handful of
smaller ones, mostly around 3.5. The scientists say that the aftershocks
are mostly generated at each end of the main fault, and one end is
uncomfortably close to the city. I don't know how accurate the location
data is, but when I put the coordinates into Google Maps it sometimes
shows the location directly under people's houses in the outer suburbs!
The shakes don't worry me so much now but the noise that precedes them
still gets the adrenalin running. The sound is hard to describe, it's a
bit like thunder.
We haven't heard anything from the insurers yet. They have tens of
thousands of claims to process and a broken chimney isn't going to be high
on the priority list so we're expecting to have to wait a while. There is
a silver lining though, due to the cost of repairing or replacing chimneys
we are likely to qualify for an energy efficient heat pump as a
replacement.
You may find the insurance situation for natural disasters to be
interesting. The first $100,000 (+tax) of damage to houses is covered by
the government-run Earthquake Commission (EQC), plus another $20,000 for
personal effects. That wouldn't even cover half the value of most houses,
so private insurance will cover any shortfall if the damage is bad enough.
I don't remember the current estimate of total damage across the city,
it's a few billion dollars which really isn't too bad when you consider
what it could have been.
I've taken tomorrow (Monday) off as it's my birthday. I also thought a
four day weekend would be nice :) We've had stunning weather over the
past few days, and I got to meet adventurer extraordinaire Steve Gurney at
an outdoors expo. I bought a copy of his autobiography because he said
he'd sign it. He's turned to coaching and motivational speaking now and
the bastard has got me thinking about goals again. I mean that in the
nicest possible way, I have tremendous respect for him and I do need a
kick in the pants from time to time.
Cheers,
Dave
David Mann
[email protected]
http://www.multisport.net.nz/
skype: multisport.net.nz
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