Surveying the damage

Back at work today, and I was expecting a big clean-up operation after the 23 December wobbles. But thankfully, there wasn’t too much of a mess. All my filing cabinet drawers were open, but because of our new policy of all furniture having to be bolted to either a wall or the floor, they didn’t actually fall over this time.

All the cracks in the internal walls have grown even bigger, of course, but we’re so used to those now that we think of them as part of the decor 😉 The only real damage in my office was that my computer fell over (but luckily wasn’t damaged), knocking my in-tray (full of filing I hadn’t got round to doing before Christmas) onto the floor.

One more picture, just to show you the force of the earthquakes. Our building is actually made up of two separate buildings which can move independently. The small (about 10 cm) gap between the buildings on each floor is covered by a metal plate. This is what happened to one of the plates on our floor:

The buildings moved so much that the plate has completely buckled! You can see too where it’s popped the screws out that secured it to the concrete floor plate (that dirt all over the floor has fallen out of the similar gap in the ceiling above).