It’s been a long time since an update, so here goes.

First, the earthquake. I always thought that if I found myself in the middle of an earthquake, I’d be in Victoria! I remember talking to Colwood’s Chief Building Inspector many years ago, and he said that all those lovely old brick and stone buildings that grace Victoria’s downtown would come tumbling down when the big one hit. That’s what happened in Colombia; a lot of older buildings collapsed.

We’re in Cali, which was hard-hit. It’s mostly older buildings that have collapsed. Our current apartment suffered almost zero damage. No cracks in floors, walls, ceilings, or the exterior. We were very fortunate. This is the building right next to ours:

Here is Elvia’s (Adriana’s mother’s) building. There are cracks at every floor, but the building administration says it’s cosmetic, not structural.

And here are Adriana, her mom, and various family members shown in the security video from Wilmer and Islena’s house. Notice they’re holding on to each other so they don’t fall while water sloshes out of the pool.

For myself, I will say it was scary as hell. We live on the second floor of a five-storey building. I was alone in the kitchen in our apartment when I noticed a large crowd of people thundering down the stairs; at first thought that they were causing the floor to shake. Then I looked out the balcony and everything seemed to be moving like crazy, including the floor I was standing on, and I realised an earthquake was underway. In fact, ‘things’ were moving so much I wondered if the building was going to come down, and I very quickly joined the crowd rushing down the stairs. I stopped for nothing: keys, shoes, nothing. I ran out in my pajamas and joined a lot of other people in theirs. (I now have a go bag sitting by the door.)

It’s hard to describe the shaking because it doesn’t seem like it should be possible. The building is concrete and steel, how could it move like that? But ‘things’ were moving, and wildly. It’s not an experience I want to repeat.

You’ve probably seen the videos on the news of the destruction, so I will only post one or two. This is Manizales; we were seriously considering moving there. It’s smaller than Cali and much cooler. It was closer to the epicentre; look at the shaking! Again, people holding onto each other so as not to fall down. And the poor church, which was a feature.

Finally, I found this to be one of the most shocking videos, and a very good example of why you get out of and well away from buildings during an earthquake.

There was lots of other damage; an older hospital partly collapsed, and there’s an inline skating place that I only just found out about because it’s facade collapsed. Rescue efforts are ongoing and the death toll is rising, sadly.

It will be very telling how Colombia recovers from this. The Guardian contrasted how Venezuela responded to their recent earthquake compared to Colombia, and it’s very early days but Colombia so far has had a vastly better response. Where the Venezuelan government went into hiding, leaving people to fend for themselves, Colombia so far has been quick and robust.

Colombia had a devastating earthquake in 1999, in which roughly “60% of the existent poorly engineered structures in Armenia collapsed, due to the high number of old structures, built without technical requirements.” Colombia put much better seismic requirements in place in 1984, but older buildings…. Here’s what part of Armenia looked like after that earthquake:

The Colombian government rebuilt Armenia and today it is a thriving small city. Will they do the same today? The just-elected president of Colombia is a pro-Trump, pro-market politician with zero government experience. (How on earth did he get elected, you ask? Well, the alternative was a left-winger who promised to continue the previous government’s Paz Total (Total Peace) which most considered an abject failure. Violence and corruption had risen significantly under the previous (left-wing) government of Gustavo Petro, and Colombians were terrified of sliding back into violence, so they elected the guy saying he would stop it.)

So will this new president help rebuild the damaged cities, or will he expect ‘the market’ to do so? Time will tell.

Our House

How about some positive news? After what seems like a very long time, it looks like construction will start next week. The delays were partly due to us, as we were slow to respond to the architect…which we were slow to do because we didn’t know what we wanted. We still haven’t picked things like floor tiles and cabinets. The municipality took months to issue the building permit because they were reassessing all the properties in our area. But at long last, we’re (almost) underway! Estimated time to build is 8-10 months, so we hope to move in April – June…and then we’ll have a great guest bedroom for visitors.

Once we get building, I’ll share some construction photos. Our design uses an Australian method that drills posts into the ground at angles to support the foundation. (The posts are underground.) This makes for a much lighter structure and should be very earthquake resistant, too.

In anticipation, I planted two small bushes on our lot. I planted them one day and came back two days later to water them…and neither plant had a single leaf remaining. Leaf cutter ants are fascinating but very destructive! I wrapped plastic around the base of the plant, and that worked. The plant below will grow into a tree with tons of white flowers, if the ants don’t kill it first. Note the plastic wrap around the base. It only has to fall off once, though, and the ants will strip the plant in a day.

That’s all for now. I hope to start posting house construction photos soon! The photo of mountains and clouds at the top of this post is a view from our lot.

Two dog videos to close out. First, here’s Ringo playing with Scrappy.

And of course, some Sanji as a puppy.

Bye for now!