THE Christchurch earthquakes brought home the vulnerability of our much-loved buildings and was a dash of cold water for historic building lovers. After the first Christchurch earthquake, protesters and campaigners fought hard to save some buildings in that city but, after the second quake, those protests surrendered to reality.
Nonetheless,I believe there is a strong case for the preservation of our buildings rather than surrendering to a "what-might-happen" scenario, and this applies in the case of the Martinborough Town Hall. That is, of course, cold comfort to the person who gets buried by brick and rubble when the big one comes along. That same person could have been saved if they had been in a modern building on rubber foundations.
Yet we do not move away from earthquake zones. If we were that terrified, we'd all be living in Northland, reckoned by scientists to be the most seismically sound part of New Zealand, with the least risk of earthquakes. Add to that the Opononi beaches and Bay of Islands sunshine, and you'd have to wonder what's holding us back.
Newspapers do their best to make earthquake risks sound intense - you've seen the front pages with big jagged lines - but I suspect the reality is people are somewhat fatalistic about quakes. We have no power to control one. We can do our best to mitigate the effect with a view to preserving life, but we can't "earthquake-proof" anything.
It is, I believe, an unconscious choice of society, of our culture, that we accept that if the big one comes along, it will flatten a lot of structures, despite all our clever engineering. If we didn't accept that, we would be pulling a lot more old buildings down - and perhaps be living in Kaitaia.
The Martinborough Town Hall is at risk from earthquakes. So is practically everything else. Engineers have learned from the Christchurch disaster and we can strengthen our old buildings to a point.
But as a culture we are not capable of simply cutting ourselves off from a situation because a quake may happen. We choose to live in these subduction zones. If we decide we're okay with that, then everything else is a variation of that choice, including keeping our buildings.
