Huge apologies to those who have been waiting with bated breath to hear more tall tales from The Land of the Long White Cloud. Over the last week we have spent less time looking at the clouds and more time hugging the ground.
If you hadn't already heard (how anyone could have missed it I don't know), Wellington has been suffering, what they charmingly refer to as, a swarm of earthquakes. It all started about a week ago with a few "pre-shocks" that tipped in at around magnitude 5. The strongest of these on the Friday (Magnitude 5.7) lasted about 30 seconds and had us putting into practise our "Drop, Cover and Hold". As it was around 9 in the morning everyone was in work and a lot of people were quite shaken (no pun intended). It was hard to concentrate on work for the rest of the day but the general consensus was that would be the end of it as it was the largest quake Wellington had experienced in a long time.
There were no noticeable quakes through Saturday although the internet was telling us there were a huge number of small tremors occurring. It wasn't until Sunday morning we felt one again. This one weighed in at 5.8 and woke us up first thing in the morning. The minor shakes carried on throughout the day and then at 5:09pm the big one hit. We had just been food shopping and walked into the house, put the shopping bags down, closed the door then heard/felt a low rumbling. This rapidly increased to shaking and we staggered to our bathroom and crouched down in the corner. After approximately 20 seconds everything went quiet again.
We got off lightly; one bottle of shampoo fell off the shelf in the bathroom. One of the girls I work with lives in an apartment block in town. She described her flat as "trashed" with large items falling down and breakages all over the place. Some city centre buildings faired even worse with structural damage, smashed windows and chunks of masonry falling off. There have only been 4 injuries that I have heard of and none too serious. I suspect this is mainly because very few people were in the office blocks in the CBD at the time of the quake.
One of the casualties of the earthquake is my workplace. It was yellow stickered before the quake (basically that means it wasn't up to modern building standards) and we were scheduled to move later this year. The quake has caused concern about the structure of main stairwells and it burst a high pressure water main in the building which has saturated everything on the bottom few floors. Today was the first time I was allowed back in and that was only to collect a few essential (if soggy) items. Whilst alternative workspace is being arranged we are all working from home (as best we can). The better half was straight back to work on Monday. Her building is touted as one of the safest in Wellington. The fact that everyone keeps saying this makes her nervous - I think it's like the Titanic predictions.
It's difficult to know how to feel about experiencing a 6.5 magnitude quake. In the grand scheme of things it was not that big, it didn't cause much damage and certainly wasn't life threatening. For comparison the earthquake in Christchurch was only 6.3 but because it was directly below the city it caused vastly more damage and loss of life. Also, this saga might not be over, the aftershocks are still going; over 30 quakes of magnitude 4 or higher since Sunday. I guess, at the moment, I am just thankful to be able to sit down, collect my thoughts and write about them. I will keep you all posted.
(No photos but if you want to know more about the quakes I recommend www.geonet.org.nz)
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