New Zealanders – like Jacinda Ardern – might not be shocked by earthquakes, but we do get scared
As I awoke to the bedroom shuddering and rattling around me on Monday morning, my first thought was a frantic household census, followed by the realisation that I was alone at home and not responsible for anyone’s safety but my own. My second, before my eyes had even properly unstuck themselves from sleep, was: “Ugh, not this again.”
Moments later, the earthquake – a magnitude 5.9 shake that hit about an hour’s drive north of Wellington, New Zealand, where I live – was subsiding. It rattled the lower part of the North Island for just 15 seconds or so, long enough for a little tendril of fear to uncurl – would it build, or die away? Was this “the big one”?
Nearby, at New Zealand’s parliament, the prime minister Jacinda Ardern was live on air when the quake struck. She barely paused as the camera jolted and the room shook, and she cast her eyes at the ceiling.
“We’re just having a bit of an earthquake here Ryan,” she told the show’s host. Her calm demeanour drew admiration around the world, but many New Zealanders recognised themselves in her actions.
“This is kinda the NZ way?” a friend said on Twitter, adding a description of her own response as “hmmm, let me look around, assess if this is actually bad enough that I should take cover, nah, let’s give it another five seconds and see … ”
The prime minister’s was an especially cool performance; she didn’t even swear, which is more impressive than me. But New Zealanders are used to earthquakes; they’re scary but not shocking. Children are taught in school to “drop, cover and hold” – diving below a desk or table, and clinging on until the shaking stops – and we were raised knowing that one day, without warning, the quake we call “the big one” would hit.
There are about 15,000 earthquakes in New Zealand each year, according to our geological science agency, with