On Saturday morning at 4:30am my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand experienced a 7.3 magnitude earthquake 40km from the city centre. Christchurch has almost 300,000 people there, it’s New Zealand’s second largest city.
Amazingly, only one person died from a heart attack and a few people were injured. My family and friends are all safe and my house amazingly isn’t damaged apart from a few cracks.
Anyway, the cleanup is going to be huge and a lot of old buildings are condemned and due to be pulled down since they are damaged beyond repair. A state of emergency has been declared and the army arrived to help out. There’s even a curfew in the evenings!
Apparently around 500 buildings have been destroyed with hundreds more damaged.
Being Kiwis, everyone still has a sense of humour. My old high school got “dramatically improved ventilation” too.
The aftershocks have been going for about 3 days now. I’m in Dunedin so I missed the actual earthquake but of course I have seen facebook updates from friends!
The aftershocks even have their own theme song.
Here are some photos (not taken by me). You can see more here and some sweet aerial footage here.
Here’s the Associated Press report.
