‘What was that? As if I wouldn’t know what that was, that hard thump’

‘What was that?’ Always the same question. As if I wouldn’t know what that was, that loud bang that shook the whole house. Coincidentally, I had just woken up. Coincidentally, my husband had also just woken up. It is so coincidental that we have to assume that we woke up from the earthquake, but only really heard that last loud bang.

I’m still waiting to see if there’s more to come. We don’t say anything, there’s not much to say. We fall asleep again. We don’t notice the aftershock in the morning.

“It was here in Zeerijp,” my husband says when he turns on his phone. “One of the strongest quakes to date.”

That’s strange, as if that announcement suddenly made you experience more than you already had. In previous quakes it was sometimes as if the floor was rippling and the walls were swaying – I didn’t notice that now, the blessed sleep has saved us from the terrifying sensation that your house doesn’t stand like a house at all, but is rather a random arrangement of walls and ceilings that might as well have ceased to hang together.

Like many others, I had come to believe that we would not be hit hard again

Now there was especially that blow, which gave the sensation that someone had thrown a boulder down from above right next to the house. Wodan or something.

It’s a big setback. Like many others, I had come to believe that we would no longer be hit hard, that stopping gas extraction had calmed things down. Now it’s just a matter of dealing with all that damage (and finally a bit quickly!) and bringing that miserable reinforcement operation to a successful conclusion and then, in about ten years, if all goes well, this would all be behind us. Every now and then a small tick that wouldn’t bother us much.

But it won’t go that way. A lot of new damage has occurred and it is not at all impossible that this will happen a few more times in the future, the State Supervision of Mines has explained it again and again, so it is not new, but hey, how does it go, if nothing happens for a while, one starts to think that nothing more will happen, short-sighted as one is. On Friday and also during the weekend, concerned emails, texts and phone calls poured in: How are you? Is everything still intact?

That’s very nice. But it was no worse or scarier than previous strong tremors, less scary even because we were asleep. And unlike some other residents of the area, I have never been afraid that my house would collapse, a solid former school building from 1952. Steel trusses in the roof. What can happen?

After four years, reinforcement advice

Well, at least something, said the experts who recently finally came by to discuss the ‘reinforcement report’. Previously, in 2021, we had been told that the house needed to be reinforced, with a report containing such strange things (that we had chimneys that were not there but that could fall down) that we objected. The objection was set aside because we received a letter stating that the building did not actually need to be reinforced at all. Hurrah! Then in 2023 a letter arrived stating that new research was needed according to new standards. Two months ago we finally received a new report with a reinforcement proposal that we did not fully understand. Two experts came who did not understand the proposal either, but did explain what the problem was: the steel trusses could snap in the middle.

So after four years we have advice. Fortunately, like some other people, we did not have major cracks, leaks, broken sliding doors or something like that, which they don’t know whether to repair or not, because if you spend 20,000 euros and you hear a year later that your entire house is going to be demolished, that is a lot of wasted money. Many people are in that position, not to mention the misery that a crack with a leak in the bathroom causes, and the annoyance of watching the house get worse and worse without any definitive information about what will happen and when.

Not all that spectacular. But it is extremely annoying for those who are affected. One day the neighbors had to leave their house immediately: acute danger! They lived in emergency housing for two years. The other neighbors, who hoped to be back home for Christmas in April in a reinforced and preserved house, have to see how work has been at a standstill for three months because a permit from the municipality has not been issued, because a lot of thought is being given to making things easier…

The neighbor on the corner is in her eighties and thinks it would be a waste of her last years if she had to live in emergency housing for more than a year now.

JA21

Joost Eerdmans of JA21 says that once the reinforcement operation is completed, gas drilling can resume. Hey yes. Then those heavy tremors start again and everyone gets cracks and damage again – or does Eerdmans think that ‘reinforcement’ means that nothing will crack anymore? It is a safety standard that concerns the chance that someone will die due to the complete or partial collapse of a home in an earthquake. No one has ever died in Groningen from collapsing during an earthquake. There are people with all kinds of physical and psychological health problems due to the leaking, cracking and shaking of the house and also due to the endless training from the government.

Not that you cannot understand that even politicians who are of good will no longer have insight into what is actually going on due to the swarm of institutions, standards, bureaus, regulations, reports, intentions and projects. After all, hardly anyone lives in the area and calls the National Coordinator Groningen for the umpteenth time and is then told that his or her so-called ‘case supervisor’ has unfortunately no longer been working there for a few months. ‘I’m sorry it’s taking so long for you.’

JA21 would like to rewrite that last sentence as: ‘How annoying for you that it will never go away’.

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