Back to normal

I am impressed that when we arrived at the mission office Monday morning, the rubble from the earthquake had been swept up into piles, and safety tape was out to mark off areas where it wouldn't be wise to walk close to the building.  The tape is important because the sidewalks are mostly right next to the buildings.
  It might be good to show you what the buildings here in downtown Zagreb look like.  This is a satellite view of the block with the mission office, but it is typical here.  Large, 2 and 3 and 4 story buildings arranged in a rectangular shape.  The Mission Office is mistakenly labeled as the Mission Officer,  but at least it has a heart.

   I went to the back of the mission office suite and looked out the window towards the top-left of the Sat photo, and looked at the building in the corner.
I saw this:

We have nothing to do with that building in the corner, but it is distressing to see such damage.

  Below is the building a couple down to the right:

.

The chimneys fell over, which is not unusual, but there is a shade above the blue balcony.  It is just corrugated sheet, and look at what is sitting on top of it!  That is a lot of concrete being held up by a piece of rusty sheet metal.  That piece fell there sometime during the day Monday, because I looked at that balcony in the morning and there were only a couple of bricks on it then.

  All around the inside of the building block, there is fallen bricks and roof tiles.  There are some smaller buildings and some of them had nasty surprises.

This is looking down from one of our suite windows to the little shed (of which we have half) we use for storing paper products and books.  Fortunately, we have the half away from the main building, so those holes in the roof are not our problem, either.  The building is 4 stories, and the ceilings are high - 12 or even 13 feet high - so the debris would have been going fast and obviously had no trouble punching through that roof.

  The street side of the buildings have little adventures, too.   This car is just down from our office.

That chimney is pretty much intact, because a Toyota caught it.  Nice catch, Toyota!

  Zagreb is very lucky this earthquake happened early in the day, before people were out and about.  6:24 am.  Almost all the buildings have some rubble in front of them on the sidewalk.

  The newer buildings have been built with the newer design bricks with lots of holes for insulation and re-bar.  That chimney luxuriating in the back seat of Toyota was built with older bricks that are a single piece.  There is a nice shot of one in the foreground of the photo.  The concrete of the chimney looks like it is in good shape, so maybe they built it fairly recently, but used old brick.  

  The facades of these buildings is stucco or concrete, but it is crumbling on the older ones.  Acid rain is my guess.

Today, things have settled down to something almost normal.  We haven't had any earth-shattering announcements for two days.  It is confirmed that we can stay here.  We had a fun little after-shock this morning.  This one really amazed me, but for the same reason as I've mentioned before.  I heard the boom, then the windows rattled, then I heard the roar, and then ... and then it shook.  It was about 2 seconds between the first sound and feeling the shake.  Weird.