On Sep 3, 2011, at 2:59 AM, John Sessoms wrote: > Did they just close off the entire city center? What did they do with all the > people?
Yep, the entire city centre was made inaccessible to the general public. We're talking 6-foot high chain link fences all the way around, with checkpoints staffed by police and army personnel. We don't have a lot of people living in that area but those who did, whose houses were safe, were given passes to allow them access. Since then they've re-opened quite a bit, but mostly in the outer parts of the CBD which were more residential. All the tower buildings and shopping / tourist stuff is still off limits but they've managed to open a couple of through-roads which helps the transport a bit. The reason why it was closed is simply because it's dangerous. There are still a significant number of unstable buildings, some of which are quite tall by our standards. About half of the buildings in the "red zone" need to be demolished. I thought I saw the exact figure today but I'm not able to track it down... I think it's in the region of 700 to 800. As for people, businesses did what they could to relocate into temporary premises in the suburbs. A lot of people were working from home for a while. Many stores were put "on hold" as they were unable to access their stock. Having said that, the city isn't entirely paralysed because we have a few big suburban malls, all but one of which were able to stay open (the other one is reopening next weekend). After a while, depending on location, business owners were allowed to arrange to be escorted to their premises to retrieve what they could within a limited time - about an hour or so but I think it varied on a case-by-case basis. This was managed street by street as they were made safe enough... provided you were accompanied by a structural engineer. > When you say "music shop" do you mean record/CD store or instrument dealer? Sorry, a record store :) Dave -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
