I hope everyone is doing ok.

yep, they are called the "shaky isles" for a reason..

7.4 is a pretty hefty shake tho, looks like only minor injuries and property damage from the news reports so far.

I was woken at 5.45am by my brother-in-law calling from NC to see if we were ok. Being further south we had slept through it - no such luck with last July's 7.8 quake!

There are a couple of active members on here from Christchurch so no doubt they'll have stories to share.

far out.. I haven't tuned on the TV today. I'll have to check out the news.

I saw on the telly that some little cars got flattened in CC. None looked like Datsuns.

Its a major shake in Chch, there are a lot of Datsun people living in the garden city and I have lots of friends living down there. I talked half a dosen friends and all are sorting out there houses as everyone has to put there furniture etc back in place and some are still without power......I would think it will be a fue days befor anyone from chch is on this site......

I'm in Christchurch.
It was a pretty harrowing experience. Woke up at 4:35am to everything shaking. I thought I'll stay in bed, but the mrs was straight up and into the doorway. So I followed. We stood there and the whole house shook like 40 bastards. The noise was deafening. It shook for 30-40 seconds. Plus it was dark too. I could see the streetlights outside flickering on and off. I'd say 99%+ of the poeple here would have been woken up by it.
We had minimum breakages at my house. Just a few tea cups and so on. A brand new bottle of absolute mandarin vodka, and an almost full bottle of single malt whiskey were knocked off the top of the book case. But luckily they landed in a basket of clean laundry! Whew!
near my house (like a 5 min walk) there is some pretty bad devastation. The road is completely impassable. There is major damage to bridges, and a large hockey and rowing facility are knackered. Huge cracks through the ground. Theres like an island of mud thats risen through the center of the creek that boarders the park. Many houses are uninhabitable. We didn't lose power,(Although many people did) but we only got our water back on about 4pm today. (I haven't had a shower since friday night)We're still being told to boil water.
The CBD is the hardest hit. Lots of old brick buildings have crumbled onto the rd. The whole area has been cordoned off.
I work for an infrastructure maintenance contracting firm, and there is just so much work out there. It's almost overwhelming the sheer amount of work that will need to be done. Plus there has been silt spew up out of the ground all over the place. Theres hundreds if not thousands of cubic meters of it. The streets that are worst hit have huge piles of it piled up on the berms.

Conversely, many areas you wouldn't even know there had been a quake.

If anyone wants to see what our media have reported, check out http://www.3news.co.nz/National/Chris ... e/tabid/1438/Default.aspx

The whole thing is almost sureal.

Lucky about your bottles of Gin and wiskey were ok Bart...but what about your Datsuns, any damage there. I was woken by a picture falling in the hallway here in Welly but did,nt realise it was an earthquake at the time....now I know. I spent the all of Saterday glued to the tv and I could,nt beleave my eyes...

My dattos were all unscathed. The boys at riverside weren't sp lucky though. (Thats a #OOPS#ty old wharehouse some bogan mates of mine live in)




A 1200 in the same warehouse only suffered minor damage.

We had a few cracker aftershocks last night. 5.4's. one of them was quite long lasting, rather than a short jolt. So I got bugger all sleep.
People are getting quite frazzled.

I was in the shower for last nights 5.4. That was a pretty interesting experience.
But considering the first one was a 7.1 that makes it 480 times more powerful than the one I had to deal with in the shower!!!! (for those who don't know the richter scale is a logorithmic scale so a 7.0 is 32 times more powerful than a 6.9)
I was also lucky, our suburb as a whole had very little damage I only sustained broken glasses and picture frames. Thankfully my entire garage and two datsuns made it through unscathed. The only thing that fell over was a bonnet and a piece of sheet metal. It must be because of my excellent (quake proof) garage organizing system of just having everything littered on the floor!! haha