Homework for those in Hawke's Bay red zone

After the 2.27am quake, many Hawke's Bay locals sought higher ground. Photo / Anusha Bradley, RNZ

It's not like we're unfamiliar with preparing for something sinister that may or may not arrive.

We've been doing it for most of the 2020s.

Covid-19 is ever present, and drifts quietly into our lives as a viral mist.

The earthquake that shook Hawke's Bay yesterday wasn't subtle. It reached out of the ocean, yanked us by the lapels, and woke more than 50,000 New Zealanders.

And left us fretting its mongrel cousin the tsunami would show up.

The 2.27am quake was a longish rattle.

In our 1950s home, the wooden windows rattle like a chest cold in winter. And also, it seems, when big earthquakes shunt by.

There were tsunami warnings, and some of us headed for high ground. We scoured Facebook, Twitter and our local mainstream media.

Here at Hawke's Bay Today, we were feeding information through to the NZ Herald, and also working on preparing our own stories. Journalists are always mindful of how we report something like this - get it wrong and you can panic people.

And when we report on natural disasters, we are providing information and news that people may use to make life-or-death decisions.

By 5.30am it was clear the 2.27am quake had eventuated to nothing.

A few hours earlier many of the 50,000 who woke up had gone back to bed.

Those who remained awake for the next few hours included Napier residents waiting for the "all clear", and an online community of quake related experts, Civil Defence people, emergency service types and journalists.

As most of New Zealand began to wake up, many of us thought that was it.
But a second round of quakes began, this time in a different location, with a lesser tsunami risk posed by the first quake.

Ironically, the lesser risk brought with it a wave of confusion.

At one point, according to social media, the Napier CBD was being evacuated. Except it wasn't - just Napier's red zone.

It didn't stop us in mainstream media making urgent phone calls to clarify things, and parents grabbing kids from childcare and schools, even though they weren't in the red zone.

And so many of us jumped on the Civil Defence page to check what the red zone was, the page crashed.

For a brief time, we were lost.

WHERE WAS THE RED ZONE?!

It arrived via some maps shared by Civil Defence, some calm mainstream reporting, and some sane social media posts.

A tsunami did not arrive, for which we are very grateful.

But we have been left with an important legacy from the experience.

To steal a line from the horror movie Jaws, Civil Defence is going to need a bigger (online) boat upon which to float its important messages during emergencies.

And those of us who live near the coast, have some homework.

Are we in the red zone, because it seems we have zoned out of the conversation around tsunamis and earthquakes.

And given what we know about our past, and what we seem to be ignoring about our future, it's a conversation we'll be having again at some point.