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Always to islanders, danger is what comes over the sea. The words by the distinguished New Zealand poet Allen Curnow were written of the arrival in 1642 of Dutch explorer Abel Tasman on these shores.
But they ring profoundly true in the aftermath of the disaster that literally engulfed our Pacific neighbours this week. A magnitude 8.3 earthquake centred less than 200km south of Samoa stirred up the ocean's depths. Within minutes - by some reports only five minutes - the sea hurled a murderous wall of water up to seven metres high onto unprotected shores.
The death toll, on the second-largest and most populated Samoan island of Upolu, in nearby American Samoa, and on the northern Tongan island of Niuatoputapu (a speck of land barely larger than Rangitoto) quickly topped 180. Samoan Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Sailele Malielegaoi, was moved to deploy grim poetry himself in his first address to the nation: "The winds have uttered their strength, earth has spoken their grief and the wave has scattered its strength," he said.
In the numbers of dead - actual and feared - and the extent of the devastation, the calamity in the Pacific is of smaller scale than the earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra only hours after the tsunami hit. And it pales in comparison to the catastrophic quake and wave in which so many perished in December 2004.
But in small communities events have enlarged impact. The population of the whole island of Upolu is less than 150,000 and many of the dead and missing come from villages of just a few hundred. The holes ripped in populations will take generations to repair.
Even for those of us at this distance, this was a disaster that struck close to home. Samoa and Tonga are in our geographic backyard. The communities dealing with the ruin inflicted by the sea this week are ones that we know well: many New Zealanders have holidayed along those sun-kissed coasts and bathed in those waters. Many others have much stronger links of blood or family history to the places now under sticky silt. Residents or citizens of this country, they still feel a deep bond to places that they will always call home. Almost as many Samoans live here as live in Samoa; the deaths that have occurred there are, in every sense of the words, family bereavements.
The spectacle of Labour MP Chris Carter slyly attempting to make political capital out of the disaster by telling the Government how it should respond was slightly distasteful. Badly co-ordinated aid initiatives at a time like this can be more hindrance than help and the disaster relief organisations on the ground will have been in no doubt about our Government's readiness to assist where and when that assistance will be most effective.
But we might profitably turn our attention to what happened here. The very short time that elapsed between the quake and the wave mocked any warning that the alert system, based in Hawaii, might have given to those on Upolo's south coast. But far from the quake's epicentre, our readiness for what might have come from the north was far from complete.
A number of vital agencies received confused warnings or no information at all from the Ministry of Civil Defence immediately after the earthquake. State television and radio got, respectively, confused information and no answer at all - a special phone hotline in Radio New Zealand's newsroom, specifically for civil defence emergencies, never rang - in the vital hour or so after the quake was recorded. Nobody mentioned anything to the folks at Wellington airport which has bodies of water at either end of the runway.
Acting Prime Minister Bill English seemed remarkably sanguine about what he described as "a bit of confusion, which can happen when an unexpected event happens very fast". He may wish to re-consider his words. Emergencies are by definition unexpected and commonly happen fast. Civil Defence's job is to expect them - and be even faster. Mercifully, we were not directly touched on Wednesday, but it seems that the standard of readiness that was demonstrated was nowhere near good enough.
How you can help
Pacific Cooperation Foundation
Deposits can be made at at any Westpac branch. All the money raised will go to the Samoan Government
Red Cross
- Make a secure online donation at redcross.org.nz
- Send cheques to the Samoan Red Cross Fund, PO Box 12140, Thorndon, Wellington 6144
- Call 0900 31 100 to make an automatic $20 donation
- Make a donation at any NZ Red Cross office
ANZ bank
Make a donation at any ANZ bank branch, or donate directly to the ANZ appeal account: 01 1839 0143546 00
Oxfam
- Make a secure online donation at
Oxfam.org.nz
- Phone 0800 400 666 or make an automatic $20 donation by calling 0900 600 20
