2 days on and Canterbury is surviving. Already major efforts are underway to start clearing unrecoverable buildings. Lots of people back at work although the city centre remains a no-go zone.
What has struck me most today is the variation in damages. The quake centre was Wards Rd, 43.55°S, 172.18°E which is 16km from our house on a direct line. So pretty bloody close then. We're feeling a lot of aftershocks that aren't been felt in town apparently although obviously the bigger ones are felt everywhere.
From the "gosh that's lucky" files, Rolleston is built on rock and river bed - mostly large stones which we're now rather thankful for (I can now accept the plus side of the blood, sweat and tears required to establish the garden with a pickaxe).
Some of the areas we saw today, all places we considered living, are not so lucky. Halswell (45km from the epicentre) and Tai Tapu (35km from the epicentre) have been badly hit, especially with the liquefaction (water bursting through loose soil/sand in the subsoil). Hard to describe the huge piles of grey silty earth covering massive tracts of roads and driveways. Not to mention bridges and roads that now have involuntarily speed humps, massive cracks and height changes. Another suburb we considered buying in (Bexley) (57km from the epicentre) is likely to be bulldozed secondary to this phenomenon. Looks like Kaiapoi in North Canterbury, about 60km from the epicentre, has also sustained severe damage.
Checking what underlies the soil will be a feature of any new house purchase/rental from now on I think!
The Rose
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