Earthquakes

Here in New Zealand we are pretty well known for our shakes, rattles and rolls.
Poor Christchurch have been rolling with them for the past 10 months.

Wellington, our capital, is also well known for the odd rattle and shake. They have been having them for much longer than Christchurch.
Yesterday they had another little rumble, in the line of 4.2 magnitude.
People said that after Christchurch they are now more aware of them, they tend to move to somewhere safer nowadays because they just don't know what to expect anymore.
The website I read this on, had the ability for you to comment at the bottom of the news item, what was interesting was the messages of support and advice the people from Christchurch were offering.

Especially in this new modern technology age, we tend to take things for granted and forget that most of what we do daily now may not work when there is no electricty.
So here are some little tips I read that are usefull for all to remember:

1. Think twice before ever considering getting rid of your land line telephone. Christchurch people said that having a mobile phone was of no use to them at all, they were unable to use them as the cell towers were down and the network, if it was working, got overloaded. Also ensure that your landline at home is a plug in the wall telephone, not one of these ones that you can walk around with, as you need electricity to power those and therefore do not work in a power outage, however, if you do not want a plain basic telephone in the house, consider storing one somewhere in the house so that when you have a power outage, you have a phone handy to plug in and use.
2. Do you have any cash in your house? When you need cash where do you get it from? If the power was out would you still have cash on you? Bet your answer to all of that was No and from the cash machine! Well have you ever considered the fact that if the power goes out you can not get cash out? Probably not, I hadn't. The people of Christchurch recommend that you keep maybe $50-100 in cash in the house somewhere so you have the ability to purchase things if the power is out.
3. Do you cook with gas? Do you light your stove / oven using the automatic starter button? Do you have matches in the house? Maybe you might need to store some somewhere, because if the electricity is out you won't be able to boil the water without them to start the gas.

The above 3 things are such simple little things that we all take for granted nowadays. We don't even think about how they work and what would happen if they weren't working.
Hope this has helped you in some way/