Christchurch Earthquake

It has been a huge three weeks since September 4th... and we weren't even in Christchurch then. Yes, we were sooo lucky not to experience the 7.1 earthquake that happenned at 4:35am on that fateful Saturday.

We were in Wanaka on a ski holiday, we were woken by a 3.6 earthquake centred up on the Snowfarm. About 20 minutes later I had a text from our security company to say that the power had gone off in our house. We thought nothing about it, other than someone had driven into a power pole.

We heard about the earthquake when we arrived in the Wanaka carpark from our neighbour who thought we were home and was concerned about our wellbeing. Subsequent calls established that our house was still standing and intact. She sounded very shaken... so to speak.

We agreed that there was nothing we could do so decided to ski for the day and return as planned on the Sunday. It was very surreil skiing around knowing what had happenned in Christchurch.

We kept watch on the news about the devastation that night and at first light went into Wanaka and absolutely packed the car with food, water, a generator and other hardware items.

We didn't get away until about 11am and after a 4 1/2 hour drive approached Christchurch. At first everything seemsed normal. It wasn't until we apprached Hornby, and then Halswell that we saw increasing damage.

A warehouse with huge dents and holes from the inside where racks and machinery had fallen through walls, broken windows, leaning walls, then slow signs and pushed up and cracked roads on Halswell Junction Rd. As we drove into Halswell there were many people digging huge piles of liquifaction sand out of their driveways. It was a 10km slalom course down the road. There were garden walls down and chimneys missing from houses. On the corner of Halswell Junction and Halswell Rds the road was severely cracked and down to one lane.

The school looked OK except the large tree out the fron of the admin block had split. Larsons Rd was impassable due to a crack about 15-20cm running right across it. We drove around the Glovers Rd and drove slowely up to our house around the liquifaction sand, man holes, which had been pushed about 30cm out of the ground all the way up the street and the cracked roads.

We arrived home about 16 hours after the first quake.

We arrived home and the gates opened, good for two reasons, they were straight and still worked and, of course, we had power. The driveway was intact, the house looked straight and intact. Inside, not so good. We entred. More to come.