There has been a minor kerfuffle over a group of Christchurch City Councillors planning a trip to San Francisco to have a look at how that city responded to their quake (I can’t find the article online at the Press, but will keep looking.) Some of the councillors are starting to get defensive about the jaunt, and given some of the other trips that councillors have taken, they might be right to be wary. I don’t particularly care if they want to go over there, I am happy that they are keen to learn from other disasters.
But how come they are only keen to learn if there is a trip to somewhere fun? There are undoubtedly lessons to be learnt from San Fran*, lessons that could be better learnt, I would argue, from actually sitting down and reading about it. Why do our politicians continue to only take lessons if those lessons involve long-haul travel to some trendy locale at someone else’s expense? While meeting people who were involved, who helped co-ordinate the recovery is no doubt a valuable exercise, sitting down and reading some reports, some books, watching the news from ’89 would be just as valuable, if not more so. Why? Well, books and reports tend to come under slightly more scrutiny than taking the opinions of one person, 20 years after the fact, as gospel.
So go. I have no problem with that. But a trip to San Francisco should be seen as a learning aid, rather than the lesson in itself. I would like to think you’ll be getting around the local libraries and trying to find some further material on disaster response, something that might push you further than riding on a tram or visiting the Full House house.
*someone from the Government might want to explain why there is no mention of San Francisco in the document that led to CERA being set up.
As someone who lived through San Francisco in ’89 and has seen that city’s transformation (for the better) in the 20+ years since — and has lived in Christchurch for the last 5 years — I have another issue with the seeming junket: the Loma Prieta quake predominately affected the San Francisco Bay Area’s transportation infrastructure — freeways and bridges in particular.
For better or worse, that’s not what we’re dealing with in Christchurch. Here, the city must tend to more basic infrastructure rebuilding: sewerage, electricity, water, etc, and all on a significantly greater scale. We’ve also got a much larger proportion of businesses and residential buildings that have been “terminally” affected.
Furthermore, the scale of the disaster relative to the size of the population, let alone the size of the city relative to the rest of the country, couldn’t be more different. The Chch quakes have had a much, much larger impact on the Canterbury and NZ populations than Loma Prieta did on the entire Bay Area population in ’89. There may be lessons to be learned from how SF recovered, but I agree that going to SF to learn them is hardly necessary.
BTW, the locals call it San Francisco. Never, ever ‘San Fran’.