Editorial: Wide eyed to wake up calls

A WEEK of wake-up calls, you could say.
There was a time, back there in the summer, that the world sort of went crazy for awhile.
We were spectators to the craziness, which considering the scale of what we watched unfold, was a most fortunate thing.
After a few months of niggling, annoying, unsettling and unpredictable aftershocks to an earthquake which shattered parts of their city, the people of Christchurch were shaken by a killer.
At 6.3, it was smaller than the shuddering pre-dawn 7.1 magnitude shake back in early September, but it was shallow and struck at a time of the day when people were out and about.
One hundred and sixty-six lives lost, and the city's infrastructure and foundations were changed forever.
It was no aftershock ... it was a standalone geological explosion.
People now live amid mud and uncertainty.
All very well to finally have some sort of resolution to one's future in terms of getting a new house nailed together but, beneath it all, is that now unreliable earth.
So last Tuesday we had a 6.5 magnitude quake roll across the North Island from its departure spot near Taupo. Some felt it and some didn't.
Some areas are more vulnerable and elastic, some are not. But it rocked and rolled, leaving some to remark philosophically: "It's about time we had one."
A few ornaments shifted ... a few framed pictures left just slightly off kilter. No real drama.
Then, on Thursday morning, the earth shook again, this time up the Kermadecs way about 800km north. A long way away, but a dodgy spot given the great south-snaking Kermadec trench and all that water above it. It's a potential tsunami factory down there and, accordingly, the alerts were issued. For an hour, it looked slightly ominous and people talked about "that one in Japan".
But it got downgraded to a "marine threat" for the eastern seaboard. Basically, nothing happened except a thing called "awareness".
Where do you go? What do you take? How do you find out what's happening?
Basically - BE PREPARED. That's no weary old cliche, it is quite simply common sense. We've had a couple of wake-up calls, so in terms of readiness don't go back to sleep.