NZ oil spill disaster - some facts

just a few things I've put together from reading online...

• "It emerged yesterday that on the day the Rena struck the reef, Maritime NZ declined an offer of two inflatable barges which could pump up to 100 tonnes of oil at a time."

• Maritime Union general secretary Joe Fleetwood said he had been calling on the New Zealand Government to buy an emergency oil spill response vessel "for years'' but to no avail. "Now we're caught with our pants down and now we're looking to (salvage company) Svitzer to get their clean-up vessels from Singapore.''
  
  
• "This is huge. It will take a long, long time to clean it up - we've never seen anything on this scale before. It could take years" - Sustainable Coastline's director Sam Judd.
  
  
• "We stand on the brink of disaster if the salvage goes wrong," said Shane Wasik, NZ Underwater Association president and a local diver.

• Our reckless centre-right gvernment are talking about using a toxic substance to clean up. Rick Steiner, a veteran of the Gulf of Mexico spill last year, said the dispersant Corexit 9500 was not suited to near-shore waters. According to the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the use of Corexit during the Exxon Valdez oil spill caused people "respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders"

Aotearoa's Patu-paiarehe people (the pre-Maori stonebuilders).

historians and scientists are forever updating their views on what happened when, so when popular thought says something is impossible, it could just mean not everyone believes it yet.

Like Ancient Europeans living in NZ and Australia? check the links.

Phoenicians in Australia who left evidence of a port, statues, altars to Ba'al, a quarry and a pyramid which has been mostly destroyed.

Celts In Aotearoa who made a stone circle in alignment with North Island volcanoes.

the red-haired Patu-paiarehe people (the pre-Maori stonebuilders) who left geographical marker-stones around Auckland and NZ, and stories of whom exist in Maori folklore.

I took this photo out in Wiri off Roscommon Road last year but forgot about it up until now finding those articles.. It looks a lot like a pyramid, no?

Its currently being quarried to death. Check out this sattelite image, you can see the quarry but you can also so how square this "hill" is. I can't find anything about it online.


i've upped the contrast so you can see it better, the photo looks like its taken at a slight angle but its pretty unmistakable. People told me its a natural hill that was probably terraced for cultivation or mining. the land around it is all flat. I want to go the quarry and have a look what its made of!

coked out

probably not the coked-up new years others experienced... I was on the Coca-Cola summer break trip to Mount Maunganui (which i am now calling Miami-Iti; as in mini-Miami) and Whangamata.

not the same mad tour as last year, a stripped back version with fewer dates and no rock 'n' roll, but once again, it was me n Chevy drawing temporary tatts with paint markers on beach-goers. behold:
chevy did this one, but i love it:

dedicated to a different Jonny, but worth a flick:
Chev always gets carried away on the big pieces, check these:

this one was super difficult..







Thanks heaps to the homie James Dhalsem GZR who took most of those flicks.

just so you know we were well accomidated, here's a sunset view east out my Tauranga hotel room..
and Sunrise:
and though i couldn't take a competent photo... at about 3am on New Years, i looked out the hotel window to see a red new moon rising over the horizon, due east, flanked by Venus. love to know what type of omen this is! i went down to the beach to try take the photo, a passing local reveller says, "thats what we locals call a Catcher's Moon, when the new moon rises like that, its perfect for fishing". Ever seen it look red before? "na man. happy new year!!!"

this is how we living...



happy 2011 friends!! looking forward to a whole bunch new adventures :)