Against the background of the September 4th 2010 a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Canterbury_earthquake"; target="_blank"Christchurch earthquake/a and the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%c5%8dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami"; target="_blank"Great East Japan Earthquake/Tsunami/a of Friday March 11th 2011, 8 days before, we finally arrived in Wellington, after a couple of weeks touring the North Island.br/This was the perhaps sensationalist Wellington Dominion Post front page we awoke to on the Saturday morning of our 3 day stay.br/The story was a reaction to a well publicised prediction by a local clairvoyant that Wellington would experience in mid to late March 2011 an earthquake and subsequent tsunami of equivalent or greater magnitude than that which had hit Japan the previous week.br/Fortunately the predicted earthquake did not eventuate while we were in Wellington although Cristchurch did apparently receive a larger than normal aftershock on that day. br/Despite the gloomy prediction and the prominence of this newspaper article on the streets Wellingtonians seemed ambivalent to any threat and carried on as usual. Clearly people were not intimidated by the prediction and life went on as normal in the city and foreshore. br/Indeed many seismologists had in fact been predicting that Wellington may well experience an earthquake at some time in the future and, due to the geography and geology of the area, it could be a serious threat to life and property. It had apparently also been widely believed prior to the Christchurch earthquake that a serious earthquake was more likely in the Cook Strait off Wellington than near Christchurch.br/One of the significant concerns for Wellington is that much of the city and port infrastucture is built on reclaimed swampland. The New Zealand national treasures stored in the Te Papa Museum on Wellington's foreshore is also considered to be at risk in the event of a destructive earthquake.br/The epicentre of the Japanese earthquake was 70km ? from Japan whereas any earthquake near Wellington would likely occur in the Cook Strait just 15 to 20km offshore and could potentially generate a massive tsunami in the region of 10-15 metres. In the event of such a calamity there would be no time to do anything except get to high ground as quickly as possible.br/The basis of this newspaper article is that it has happened before in Wellington. In 1855, or 156 years ago, Wellington, as quoted in this article, had a seismic event of the order of the March 2011 Japanese earthquake/tsunami. In those days Wellington only had a population of around 3,000 and the loss of 9 lives reflected that small population. By comparison due to much greater population density the Japanese tsunami in March 2011 killed 15,457 people with 7,676 (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%c5%8dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami"; target="_blank"Wikipedia/a) still missing.