Written on 7 February 2012
This is here because Whaea Clare asked me to check about the Napier earthquake after we discusses the scientist in Frog Whistle Mine by Des Hunt
Peculiar signs have been noted in nature before disaster, Michael Fowler discovers.
The unusual behaviour of some animals before a large seismic event is a phenomenon some have witnessed or heard of.
Before the Boxing Day tsunamis of 2004, elephants in Sri Lanka and Sumatra apparently made for higher ground - trumpeting loudly as they went. Some believe that animals have a "sixth sense" and, therefore, have advanced warning of potentially catastrophic events.
While researching for my book, From Disaster to Recovery, I was told a number of stories in relation to peculiar animal behaviour before the February 3, 1931, 7.8-magnitude Hawke's Bay earthquake that killed 258 people.
Hastings accountant Harold Carr told his daughter, Diane, that a couple of days before the 1931 earthquake, a client from Napier, had said, "Harold, last evening I saw the most extraordinary sight. I was going along Marine Parade, going into Napier, and there were rats running, running away from Napier along the road."
The Devoy family at Haumoana noticed pukeko leaving swamps and making for higher ground the day before the earthquake and thought that most strange.
Hastings tailor Thomas Honnor had a tradition of walking (complete in waistcoat and long trousers) to the gannet colony at Cape Kidnappers every year.
Two days before the earthquake, he made his annual walk but, on his return, told family members the birds were "very restless and unsettled".
After the 1931 earthquake, animals were keen to escape the aftershocks and the HMS Veronica, berthed in Napier, became something of an animal shelter, as many cats and dogs leapt on to the ship.
Residents near Cornwall Park, Hastings, had a few seconds warning an aftershock was on its way at night as the birdlife twittered away loudly beforehand.
Non-animal phenomenon has also been reported before major earthquakes, such as strange lights in the sky before the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China.
One phenomenon has always fascinated me, and it was told to me by Alan Grant in 2006, concerning an observation his mother, Dulcie, had made while travelling with her husband to Rotorua, on the morning of the 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake.
When leaving Napier, Dulcie thought the sea looked "like a string of sausages". She then had an "uncomfortable sense of dread" and continued to voice that to her husband at various stages of their journey.
Upon arriving in Rotorua, they were told of the deadly 7.8 quake that had occurred in Hawke's Bay.
I have often wondered about what Dulcie saw and thought perhaps it was just a heat-haze mirage - until two weeks ago I received a letter from Jan Graham of Hastings, who had read Dulcie's account in my book.
On May 22, 1960, Jan had been on a chartered fishing trip with her husband in Whitianga. On the open waters, the woman skipper became alarmed and pointed out what appeared to be a string of islands on the horizon.
"There are no islands there," she said. "The last time I saw this phenomenon was the morning of the Hawke's Bay earthquake in 1931. My father and I were out fishing in the bay."
The woman skipper - afraid of this seemingly bad omen - turned the boat back to the harbour and refunded their money.
The next morning the world's largest recorded earthquake, at a 9.5 magnitude, struck off the coast of Chile, and generated a huge tsunami in the Pacific Ocean. The wave killed 61 people in Hawaii and 199 in Japan.
The tsunami also uncovered the 1840 wreck of the HMS Buffalo in Whitianga when the sea retreated. In Hawke's Bay, pleasure boats were swept out to sea at Ahuriri and Burden's camping ground at Te Awanga was swamped, flooding the tents of eight Maori camped there but there was no loss of life.
While we know what causes earthquakes, predictions of when they will exactly occur are still an inexact science.
Perhaps nature has a way of warning of seismic events that our ancestors, perhaps more in tune with nature, understood.
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