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OK, I'll move it to The Lounge.
The main north south highway is now open from 7am till 8.30pm. We drove it just after Christmas, and by heck they have done some work. This was a week after it reopened, and still in the Christmas holiday period, and the Kaikoura locals were saying it was the busiest the town had ever been, period.
The highway tunnels are all gone, and parts have been rebuilt on causeways and bridges 100 metres off the original coast line, to get them away from unstable rock faces. Some of it is still temporary and very close to the sea with huge concrete blocks protecting it. Amazingly, the road was closed again after a storm washed those blocks into the road.
SH1 closed reopens near Kaikōura after sea blocks washed onto road | Stuff.co.nz
We could see diggers that had carved a path 100s of feet up slopes of loose spoil. Some of this was done with remote controlled diggers, but most of it was highly skilled, and very brave operators. Sorry, not a great picture, but you'll see what I mean
Fortunately, this happened overnight when no one was in the digger. Where it was safe to do so, work carried on 24/7 under floodlights, but that would not have been practical at the top of the slip.
The most sought after job was the abseilers. It was great pay, and reasonable safe so long as they were not hit by rockfall from above. And what a view!
They used helicopters to wash the loosest rocks off with monsoon buckets.
What they could not get moving with pry bars, was persuaded down the hill with explosives. 🙂
The initial reopening
State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura opens after 13-month rebuild | Stuff.co.nz
Up to 1700 people have been working on the road and rail repairs, and it is a 90 minute drive from Blenheim, so they built a wee temporary housing for them. This only takes 300 people, but a lot are staying Kaikoura. They had to build causeways around the slips for workers and construction machinery to get to the closed off slips. This was built with spill from the slips, so a touch of serendipity there.
I am not sure about some of the inland communities like Clarence. It looks like they have a temporary bridge at the moment. It was quite a while before they even contacted after the quake a year ago, and they were completely cut off. Imagine finding that the bridge connecting you to the rest of the world and the nearest shops, was completely gone?
To put this in perspective, it is seven years since the Christchurch quake, and they are still rebuilding. A _lot_ of people have yet to agree terms with insurance companies, and a _lot_ ot people have no sewage and are relying on portaloos. That's not a good look. It's a bad time to be getting into the housing market, as insurance companies don't want to take on new customers in high risk zones. You can't get a mortgage without house cover, so goodness knows what is happening with that.
A bit of a mish mash of a report because I kept jumping about as I thought of stuff. They worked their socks off to get the road reopened in just a year. Meanwhile it was one heck of a detour to get to Christchurch. Ignore the Molesworth road in the image below. It is a 4x4 track only open from January to April, and while I have seen family saloons use it, you couldn't drive a truck through. One of the bridges was out anyway, which meant a river crossing — we heard that some people were directed along the Molesworth when SH1 was closed again after the storm. People were running out of petrol, and getting stuck. Crazy!
That'll do you. I'll post this before my computer crashes and makes me cry — although this should recover if that happened.
jane-e wrote
Thanks for the update, Trevor.Dennis . That's quite a story about the rebuilding. What about individual homes?
Not such a big problem with this quake as it mainly affected small towns. We build light weight timber framed houses with light roof trusses and sheet steel roofs, and these move with the quakes without generating too much inertia. The Christchurch quake seven yes ago was not as severe, but with lots of very solid buildings, the damage to property was _much_ worse. The cathedral being a good example.
My step son was working just off the Square when that quake struck, and phoned me as it happened. He described seeing an arm protruding from the rubble when the dust cleared. We did get property damage from the Kaikoura quake though. Yealands winery was close to the epicenter, and lost 90% of its tanks. They had similar damage just a year earlier in the Seddon quake, so I wouldn't want to be their insurer. These tanks are made locally, and there was a shortage of the stainless steel they are made of, so Peter (Yealand) sourced some himself from Japan — he is that sort of a person.
Marlborough's Yealands winery suffers 'notable damage' in major earthquake | 1 NEWS NOW | TVNZ
This was the worst of the damage to homes locally. We initially heard of one death due to trauma, but that was later changed to heart failure. A daft distinction IMO as the heart failure would not have happened if the house had not collapsed on the victim
There was serious damage to several large buildings in Wellington, but Wellington was closer to the second (stronger) stage of the quake which was offshore near Seddon.
Some of the building damage was just a bit embarrassing as it included two government buildings, one being the Department of Statistics which was only a few years old.
Images like this are among my favourite. As I said above, the quake was two stages lasting two full minutes. It started inland from Kaikoua, and then moved at great speed offshore from Seddon. The Geonet scientists were totally stoked with excitement about this aspect because it was rare, and experts came from all over the world to study it. The bit that I love the most is that the shock wave traveled between the two epicenters at a speed of two thousand kilometres per hour. That is incredible. Imagine standing with a foot each side of that fault line when it happened? The high side was thrust up rather than the low side dropping, so you'd have been put into orbit. This extended well offshore, which created a very decent tsunami by all accounts.
Fortunately the uplift was less intense here, but this happened at 12.30am — come to think of it, I know people who would have slept through it. 
Hey, it's not all hobbits and beautiful scenery. NZ has just two native mammals those being two species of very small bats. We had one fly into our house a few years ago, and it was like a big moth. I caught (very carefully) and it was like fine chamois leather to touch. When we mentioned it and were told how rare they are, we contacted the 'bat society' who were rapt to hear about one in our location.
We are close to a river that passes through an area they are more common, so it might have come down stream chasing insects. Which nicely segways to the [drum roll] the SAND FLY!!! We have no snakes, poisonous spiders, leeches or scorpions, but in a battle between a single sandfly and a dozen poisonous snakes, the sandfly would win with one wing tied behind its back.
This is an actual photograph of a man shortly before being eaten alive by a baby sandfly.
I first came to NZ as a tourist and on that first trip I did the Milford, Kepler, and part of the Cascade Saddle tramps. The Milford was the first, and I can still remember being in the sleeping bag and the unbelievable discomfort of dozens of sandfly bites (they get worse when you are warm). They don't bother me much now, but my wife still suffers and comes up in swollen red blotches moments after being bitten. It actually hurts, and forgetting the above image, you can barely see the things they are so small, but by heck they pack a punch.
Although the two tiny bats are the only natives, a lot of animals have been introduced here for various reasons, and they have lived to regret just about all of them. This Wikipedia page gives details.
Mammals of New Zealand - Wikipedia
Possums and rabbits are the most problematic. Possums destroy trees and our Department of Conservation drops 1080 poison pellets from helicopters to try and control them. On the plus side, mixed with merino wool, their fur makes for amazing soft clothing that once worn, you can never go back to ordinary wool.
Things also grow at an amazing rate here. When I planted this palm 12 years ago, it was about 18 inches high. It is on an irrigation system, and gets warmth from the concrete path, and it is at least 15 feet high now. You can see the lightweight roof in the background. Properties are nearly all single story because of the earthquakes. Our house has single thickness brick fascia over timber frame. They do crack, but are easily repaired, and more importantly, tend not to fall down. We have cracks in tiled floors which my wife frets over, but it is what it is, and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
jane-e wrote
But
Didn't you mean to put the baby sandfly photo on the "Something for the Weekend" thread?
I just spent 20 minutes on a gag composite to send out to some buddies, and Photoshop crashed completely and I lost the lot — again. 
It's soul destroying but you know what it's like. You get an idea and you can't help yourself. Maybe next week, but I'll believe it when it it happens. Come to think of it, I had another image open that I was a mock up for the new windows we are getting, and my wife had asked me to do. That was saved thank goodness. On Dave's suggestion I have installed back to CC2014, but they are equally unstable. I'd chase up some early drivers for the old GPU, but I keep telling myself there is no point as the new box can't be that far away. It makes me wonder how many of those Photoshop ate my PSD files are due to outdated, unstable hardware and flaky operating systems. Most of them is my guess.
[EDIT] If my computer was not so sick, I'd have put a mini-me next to the palm to make it look bigger.
Ussnorway wrote
council approved that tree placement I assume?
Hey, a buddy of mine used to be the mayor here.
They have named a little square in the town after her. A fact she reveled in until we pointed out that not many people have toilets named after them.
Actually we are least corrupt country in the world tied with Denmark. I suspect this is to do with the fact that your average Kiwi would rather go to the beach than work overtime to get a few extra dollars.
Corruption Perceptions Index - Wikipedia
jane-e wrote
We are all looking forward to your new stable hardware
Looking forward to the end of me bleating on about it at least. I suspect I have been making a meal of it, but by heck it has been an experience. If they get it finished this coming week, it will be four months since I paid them a hefty deposit.
Trevor.Dennis wrote
jane-e wrote
We are all looking forward to your new stable hardware
Looking forward to the end of me bleating on about it at least.
Well, yes, that too, hahaha! 
Anyway, looking forward to your posts on "Something for the Weekend". You'll have a lot of catching up to do!
The total campaign expenditure of the USA President candidates was staggering — I'm guessing that the total would come close to $3 billion! Just think of the positive ways $3 billion could be pent. In comparison, the major parties in the New Zealand parliament will measure their campaign costs in the hundreds of thousands, and their election expenditure is capped anyway. Political funding in New Zealand - Wikipedia
How much money is behind each campaign? - Washington Post
Even taking a per capita view of those figures — NZ has a population of 4.5 million to the USA's 323 million (by heck that has grown since I last looked it up) — the difference still beggars belief. So, while this does not necessarily amount to a recipe for corruption, a newly elected POTUS is going to be beholding to a lot of special interest groups.
Dag There have been a few theories about Donald Trump's physiological profile put out there by medical professionals. The narcissist high functioning psychopath point of view would surely also be a good fit for Jacob Zuma, and it would be no surprise to hear that countless other leaders had psychopathic traits. Caligula, Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein.... OK Gaddafi was just plain crazy, but dozens upon dozens of world leaders throughout history would have been incapable of self doubt or accepting they were wrong. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well here are two well written articles with apparently opposite points of view
Incidentally, I am not actually a real person, but rather a fake news bot coded in a Russian computer laboratory funded by the Kremlin on orders of that other psychopath Vladimir Putin.
https://forums.adobe.com/people/D+Fosse wrote
[snipity snip] You could also add Silvio Berlusconi and a bunch of others to that list,
Really?
I'll never be able to listen to this song again
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