World: Big Earthquake Hits New Zealand

Beautiful New Zealand, scenic site of the shooting of fave movie(s) Lord of the Rings, experienced a 6.8 earthquake today, according to its government. The USGS rates the earthquake at 6.6. Although we'd like to take this opportunity to say, based on our experience, that it really don't make much difference what they rate it at, once you hit 6 on the seismometer. It's just a question of whether you can get your stomach out of your teeth and your eyeballs out of the ceiling, at that point.

CNN has the details. The quake apparently originated in the coastal city of Gisborne, which reports some structural damage to buildings, but no apparent deaths or serious injuries. Communications are currently described as "patchy," so if you know someone in or around that area, you might want to wait a day before calling and overloading the phone lines.

No danger of a tsunami, thank Poseidon.

Aside: Those who know us know that we live in a disaster-prone area, and each time one hits, the phone lines are affected. Naturally, everybody inside and outside the disaster zone wants to reassure/contact friends on the other side. Unfortunately, this causes problems. Suffice it to say that when the last major disaster hit (thanks, CNN, for the coverage!), the Authorities (cops, FD, whoever-all wears dem big hats) unanimously requested that frantic callers limit their efforts so that disaster response could take place. While our friends were looking at round-the-clock TV coverage of our stricken homebase, we were not able to get an outside connection to reach them, nor were they able to call in and find out whether we survived.

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