Mirian reports from scene of disaster

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MIRI: Most Sarawakians watched the devastating earthquake in Christchurch, on television, but Jason Lai from Miri reports from the scene of the disaster.

HAIR-RAISING EXPERIENCE: Software tester Jason walks into an earthquake during his lunch break.

Jason, a software tester with Clarus Limited, was having his lunch break at his favourite cafe at the Westfield Mall in Riccarton when it happened.

The cafe doors were shuddering and things falling all over the place.

“It happened without any warning though earthquakes are usually preceded by a distant rumble,” he recalled.

He was lucky to escape unscathed from the quake which already claimed 100 lives and injured thousands, turning this beautiful city into a war zone.

“Most Mirians or Sarawakians I know are safe and sound, without injuries, although some of their houses aren’t,” he wrote to The Borneo Post in an email.

It lasted only 20 seconds but felt like eternity from the moment he walked into his favourite cafe.

The crowd immediately headed for the street, and it only dawned upon them that it was a potential death trap when they saw buildings tumbling down on the streets.

After the last earthquake on Sept 4, 2010 and the hundreds of aftershocks that came after, most Christchurch residents were pretty familiar with
the signs of an earthquake, and the ground threatening to throw them and everything falling down around them was a sign of a major one hitting them.

“The danger was very real, anyone who was inside or even near a building was at a high risk of injury or worse — God bless the ones who didn’t make it,” he said.

Jason said this particular earthquake, despite being lower in magnitude at 6.3 on the Richter Scale, was much closer to them and shallower.

“Once the two were combined, we ended up with an extremely violent quake, one that gave us absolutely no warning,” he said.

“I was just walking through the doors of my favourite cafe when the walls refused to stand still.

“The noise was deafening, screaming people sprinting to the door, many falling over when the ground under their feet moved, fixtures falling off the walls, glass and tableware crashing everywhere as all loose items got thrown around,” he said.

Most of the crowd from the mall convened in a small street that ran between the two sections of the mall, and they thought it was over until another violent quake rumbled in shortly, forcing mayhem as everyone ran along the middle of the street, as far away from the buildings as possible.

“That was when I noticed the walkover bridge between the two sections above
us swinging about as the ground shuddered, and how the joints that held it all up were cracked along the sides,” he recalled.

When the dust settled, the central business district of Christchurch was in ruins, with many buildings crumbling down, weakened by the first quake and the numerous aftershocks.

Jason said the fatality count reached almost 100 yesterday, with many people still unaccounted for or buried underneath the rubble.

Power was cut for half the city and those few with water had its supply contaminated, as both water and sewage pipes cracked under the strain.

In the aftermath, silt volcanoes popped up from all over the place including roads, reducing traffic to a crawl and international teams are helping the overwhelmed Kiwis in the search-and-rescue.

Meanwhile, the authorities have yet to announce if there was any Sarawakian injured or killed in the New Zealand earthquake.