Things that go Thump in the Night

Did the Earth Move for You?

Last week, at 12:04 on Monday morning, we had a wee Earthquake.
For any Kiwi or even Japanese readers of m'blog, an explanation of what being in a major earthquake feels like would be superfluous, but for most others, let me say

IT WAS BLOODY SCARY.

When the first trembling started, it was enough to wake me up, but it wasn't too bad.  The worst was when my Beloved hit me.

She thought that I was "mucking about" or just turning over in bed by bouncing on the mattress, so she does what she normally does when she gets upset with me (a more than rare occurrence) she hits me. 

I've still got the bruise.

However, back to the earthquake.

The movements began to escalate, accompanied by a baso-profundo rumble.  The house started to sway, we could hear the joints creaking and moaning, and IT DIDN'TSTOP.  It went on for bloody ages.

My Beloved began to fart (a sure sign of semi-terminal stress), the dog began to howl, alarms were going off all around, and I said "Goodness" "Isn't this exciting"

My Beloved hit me again.

It stopped (The hitting as well as the quake)

I went back to sleep, and slept right through the next, slightly smaller one at about 2:30am.

DeepSleep

Next morning at school, a bit earlier than usual, around 6:30am, just to check the bloody place was still there.

Nuova Lazio High School is built in the slum Garden Suburb of Nuova Lazio (funny that, must be a coincidence) which happens to be built on a drained swamp in the middle of an ancient caldera, so when the shaky Gods of Aoteroa start feeling their oats, nobody's quite sure whether the whole place will disappear into a stinking 200m deep quagmire,

or be blown to Kingdom F*cking Come.

It does lead to some trepidation amongst the citizenry.


This time however, all seemed OK, no obvious damage, so the Boss-Man (not me, I hasten to add, I'm just an assistant Boss) said the school would be open for business (Teaching and Learning ....HAHAHHAHAHAHA) that day.

We are having our big end-of-year exams, run by the NZQA (my job to organise and administer) and set in our Auditorium.  When I had a look in there, it looked OK, apart from a couple of big, free-standing wooden back-of-stage thingies, which had fallen down and crushed a couple of desks. (Luckily, the quake was in the middle of the night.  If it had happened during an exam, we would probably have lost a couple of students)

We might have had a squashed student

So the exams went on.

We got blasted by parents who thought we should have closed the school.
We got praised by parents who were gratified at our efforts to allow the students to complete their exams.

Some days, you just can't win.

I had to shut the Auditorium that afternoon, as there were some tiles hanging loose in the ceiling.
We all saw them, but thought they were polystyrene, and no threat. 

However.

One fell down at lunchtime, and it proved to be made of a fibre-reinforced plaster, backed by plywood, and each tile weighed about 30kg.

So we shut the bloody death trap before someone got killed, and moved the exams into some other rooms, displacing Richard {of RBB], but that doesn't matter, it's only Music.