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Quiet Desperation:

The New Zealand Floods Of 2053

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 4

 

Summary: In the first three parts of this series we called the 2053 New Zealand floods and the seaquake which preceded them; the divisive choice of New Zealander prime minister Henry Woodburn to appoint Emma Keeler as head the post-flood recovery effort; the circumstances which eventually led to Keeler’s resignation; and the December 2053 general elections that turned Woodburn out of office. In this final chapter of the series, we’ll examine how the ‘53 floods and the political turmoil stemming from Keeler’s direction of the post-recovery effort are still affecting New Zealand today.

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New Zealand’s newly elected prime minister, Jonathan Goldsmith, had two quite daunting tasks facing him as he assumed office. Not only did he have to keep the post-July flood recovery effort going, but he was also saddled with the burden of trying to restore confidence in a government which had been badly shaken by the controversy surrounding the Woodburn administration’s handling-- or, in the eyes of the former prime minister’s legion of critics, mishandling --of the initial phase of post-disaster relief operations. Goldsmith and the new post-flood recovery program director, Evan Perkins, held a press conference three days after Goldsmith’s swearing-in to address fears that the Goldsmith administration might repeat its predecessors’ mistakes.

To his considerable credit, Goldsmith proved more than capable of handling the grave burdens which had been thrust on him. In his first televised speech as prime minister he gave reassurance and hope to a country in desperate need of both; he earned further respect by using the strategic and tactical planning skills he’d learned in the army to bring order to the chaos Emma Keeler had created by her mismanagement of the early phases of the post-flooding relief program. His choice of Evan Perkins as new director of the relief effort helped to reinforce public trust in his ability to bring New Zealand out of the political and psychological crisis it had been mired in since the July floods. A month into his administration Prime Minister Goldsmith was enjoying an approval rating of 80 percent-- better than some New Zealander PMs had managed to reach after years in office.

Goldsmith would remain prime minister more than eight and a half years before retiring in the summer of 2062 to take up a position with the World Bank as an advisor on disaster relief issues affecting the Southern Hemisphere. During those eight and a half years New Zealand would rise from the ashes to become the third-strongest economic power in the Pacific region, surpassed only by the U.S. and China. Such was Goldsmith’s stature by the time he left office there were more than a dozen online petition drives going to have major streets in Wellington and Christchurch renamed in his honor; a 2060 New Zealand Herald poll had named him one of the fifty greatest New Zealanders of the past 100 years; and his old army unit had rechristened its operations building after him. There was even a movement underway to get his face onto the “Kiwi dollar” coin.

******

Henry Woodburn, once one of New Zealand’s most visible men, has become almost a recluse since the December 2053 electoral defeat which ended his political career. The former prime minister hasn’t made many public appearances since 2055 and seldom grants interviews anymore; in fact, during the early 2060s, rumors intermittently circulated that he had either died from pancreatic cancer or committed suicide. It took a series of digital photos showing Woodburn walking about the garden of his retirement home to dispel those rumors once and for all-- and even then there were still suggestions he might not be long for this world. He’s become almost an afterthought on New Zealand’s political scene; a 2065 Times of London article called him “New Zealand’s forgotten prime minister”, and there’s considerable truth to this claim given that six out of ten New Zealanders surveyed in a recent poll couldn’t identify Woodburn from a photograph.

By contrast Emma Keeler is making a return to public prominence after spending a decade in obscurity. Although she has largely avoided the political arena since resigning as director of the post-2053 flood recovery effort, Keeler does occasionally publish commentaries on many issues for New Zealand’s major online media services. There are still a great many people for who the mere mention of Keeler’s name triggers a burst of seething rage, but with the passage of time she’s not quite the polarizing figure she was fifteen years earlier. Some relatives of flood victims have even started coming to her defense when accusations about her handling of the post-flood relief effort are revived.

Keeler’s successor, Evan Perkins, is still working in the field of disaster relief; as recently as six months ago he was in Venezuela leading efforts to aid the survivors of the Caracas earthquake, and is also extensively involved in programs to distribute bird flu vaccines to the people of Vietnam to prevent the further spread of the terrible Jakarta-2 strain in that country. His autobiography, To The Memory Of The Dead, has sold 2 million copies in print and another 500,000 in e- book format since it was published last fall. In this country Perkins has been extensively involved with the ongoing efforts to maintain the Pacific Horizon Memorial in Los Angeles as well as the search & rescue operations which followed last December’s avalanche at Mount Shasta in California.

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In just about every sense you can imagine-- physical, social, emotional, psychological --the New Zealand of 2068 is a vastly changed country from the one which existed prior to the floods that devastated it fifteen years ago. Anti-flood barriers dot the country’s coastline; nearly one-fifth of the New Zealander defense ministry’s annual budget is allocated to maintaining a fleet of transport aircraft whose chief function is serve as a means of evacuating civilians from areas being threatened by imminent flooding. Construction codes for new buildings are the strictest of any nation in the Pacific Basin, while residents of New Zealand’s coastal cities and towns are leaving them in steadily growing numbers for the country’s interior, which is thought to be at least moderately safer from flooding. Civilian oceanographers now work closely with the Royal New Zealand Navy to monitor New Zealand’s coast for any signs of seismic activity that might suggest the approach of a tsunami.

The country’s cultural institutions have produced a host of works which even if they’re not directly about the 2053 floods are shaped to a considerable degree by that tragedy. To name just a few of the best- known examples of this phenomenon, a series of e-books about a teenage girl whose parents fall victim to a catastrophic flood has brought its author, himself a 2053 floods survivor, worldwide fame and millions of dollars in online sales; a metal sculpture fashioned from debris found in Wellington Harbor after the disaster has been displayed at London’s National Gallery since 2058; and the La Scala opera house in Italy was recently host to the debut of a three-act piece titled An Elegy For A Drowned Man. Two of the six nominees for Best Foreign Picture at last year’s Academy Awards were movies dealing with the 2053 flood and its consequences, and as of the time when this article was posted four new films about the disaster are in production. The catastrophe has even found its way into the world of computer and video games-- last August the Taiwan-based entertainment software firm Global Village released a first-person simulator game in which the player steps into the role of an emergency responder trying to rescue victims of the 2053 floods and seaquake.

The 2053 floods have also served to strengthen ties between New Zealand and Australia. Every year on the anniversary of the disaster an Australian Army honor guard lays a wreath in the victims’ memory at the gates of the New Zealander embassy in Canberra; in turn, the New Zealand government maintains a memorial park in Auckland paying tribute to the Australian volunteers who assisted New Zealand’s own search and rescue workers in the aftermath of the seaquake and floods. The 2061 Melbourne mutual disaster relief aid pact is a direct result of what happened in 2053, as are the annual joint search and rescue drills held by the Royal Australian Navy and the New Zealand Navy off the coast of Stewart Island.

But perhaps the most lasting legacy of the 2053 floods is the massive change the seaquake has wrought on New Zealand’s coastline. As a result of the seaquake which brought the floods, the sea floor immediately off the New Zealand shore has sunk by more than a dozen miles and nearly two and a half square feet of beachfront has eroded away under the stresses inflicted on it by the tremors. Seismologists warn that history may one day repeat itself given the volatile nature of the tectonic plates in the Pacific region.


An American cruise ship sunk during the same seaquake that triggered the 2053 New Zealand floods; see Part 1 for further details.

 

 

 

 


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