Two minutes silence today
It was eerily quiet as everyone in town stopped, respectfully, to observe two minutes’ silence, a week on from the February 22nd earthquake. The tears flowed freely, thinking about those lost, their families’ grief and the shattered city itself. We have all lost so much.
Meanwhile, the golden turkey award of the day must go to Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee who described Christchurch’s historic buildings as ‘old dungers’. Most will accept the idea that many of the older heritage buildings, now in ruins anyway, would pose an ongoing safety risk if an attempt to rebuild was made, but we are also talking here about the city’s history, heart and soul. To dismiss the lot of it as so much inconvenient trash is disturbing. Where’s a sense of respect here??? And where do the old dungers stop and the core stuff worth holding onto begin, I wonder? In any case, it seems to me the highest risk buildings - where the most people died - are, in fact, the semi-high rise concrete structures from the 1960s and 1970s and these are the ones that need to come under the most intense scrutiny.
