Andrew's earthquake story

Here is Andrew's sort that I help him to write after the earthquake.

It starts with a picture of a smile. (I am not sure why).

"There was a big aftershock/earthquake. We all got out of the house. There was flour in my boot.

Some people calmed us down by praying. Aunty Margaret came down. She was crying and said her house was falling down.

I thought we needed a plan. Daddy was a at work. He came home in his car. The plan was to go in Daddy's car."

Rachel's earthquake stories

This is the story as Rachel told it to Aunty Margaret last Friday.

"Ran over the water and the earthquake was shaked my toys. Paddling pool was broken. TV was broken. Mummy saved my toys. My dad went to sleep and I went to sleep in daddy's bedroom and Andrew. Aunty Margaret was sleep in one of my friends beds. I went in the lounge and Joe in lounge. Someone ask me was my name was I said Rachel. The earthquake shaken my car. Aunty Margaret and Thomas was crying and Andrew and mum."

Later once we discover the TV that had fallen over was in fact working. Rachel was saying Daddy fixed the TV. Although he only just turned it on.

The night of the earthquake i was talking with the kids and saying that I had an upset tummy(due to the stress). I had butterflies in my tummy. After this Rachel has been saying she has pink butterflies in her tummy. Sometimes she even has spiders in her tummy. Mummy has yellow butterflies in her tummy. What colour butterflies to do you have?

22nd February - Stephen's Therapuetic Recollection

There is a new term in use, or perhaps rather, a new nuance. “The first one.” The term use to mean “not any of the aftershocks, which, sure, make your heart race, but are nothing like the first one”. Now it means “I’m talking about an earthquake. No, not that earthquake, the first one.”

Tuesday 22nd February was looking like it was going to be a great day. There were two main reasons for that. Firstly, my entry in the ACM Queue Icy Projectile Challenge (a programming competition to write code to control a team of players having a snow fight) had reached the top 6, from a starting field of 72. A round or two of matches is run starting at 1pm (NZDT) each day, so I had a browser window open at the right page, ready for the occasional refresh throughout the afternoon, to check whether the results had been posted yet.

The second reason was that our house in Wellington, despite getting no tenders, had just had two people want to buy it, and submit offers. I was wanting to get our lawyer’s opinion on a few things; whether the contract had anything in it that wasn’t obvious; procedures around selling a house that is tenanted; and also if there were any issues with using email for entering into contracts when you’re in a different part of the country. I’d managed to secure an afternoon appointment, and had emailed my (Petone based) manager telling her I was distracted trying to sell a house.

Distractions really affect the productivity of software developers. I’m sure that the drop in my productivity since September has been noticeable. Every time there is a small aftershock, or someone in the room mentions something interesting about earthquakes, aftershocks, or maps, I get distracted.

The 2 storey building in Addington / Tower Junction area that I work in, has fork lifts working in it too, and when I first started working upstairs there nearly two years ago, I’d keep feeling the building shake, and think “is that an earthquake?”, but nobody else paid any attention to it, and I figured out it was forklift operators putting something down. I’ve lived in earthquake prone spots before, and the kind of movement I was feeling would usually result in a discussion about whether it was an earthquake, or a truck outside, etc. Those kinds of discussions after any movement became the norm after September, when everyone else realised that what I’d been feeling for a year and a half, could have causes beyond anyone’s control.

During a couple of the really big aftershocks, I’d put my hands on my monitors to stop them from falling over. 19th October was one of those occasions, the shaking that day seemed very “up and down”.

At 12:51 on Tuesday last week, 22nd Feb, the building started shaking again. Initially it seemed similar to the aftershock of 19th October, and I stood, held on to the monitors for a few seconds, then realised that the shaking was more violent, and the monitors were bouncing on the desk and the computer case. Fearing that ceiling tiles might drop, I got under my desk, where I think my mind retreated into a daze, waiting till it could comprehend the sensory input. A workmate telling me to get out of the building made me realise that the shaking had subsided. My mind started accepting visual & touch input again, and I realised I’d bumped my neck on the side of the desk in my attempt to get under it. It was a little sore, but nothing to worry about (and hasn’t been anything to worry about since). Knowing that cellphone networks quickly become congested, I quickly sent Kathryn a txt saying I was unhurt (my phone says I sent it at 12:51, but my phone now appears to be nearly two minutes slow). I then realised there was nobody left upstairs in our office, and went down and outside myself.

I knew that a big shake like that is usually followed by some smaller aftershock-aftershocks, and sure enough, at 12:56 there was another smaller shake. I, and a number of others, figured that was probably it, and went back in to see what the status was. The lights were still on. My PC was still on. One monitor had fallen over, but I stood it up again, and it was still going. Some books had fallen out of the bookshelf. I hit refresh on the browser, and it refreshed ok, I tried loading a different page, and that worked, so we still had internet connection. Several people were trying to use the phones, with mixed success. I tried to send a quick email to my Petone colleagues, saying we’d had another aftershock, still had power, phones were patchy. I took a look at the siesmic drum web page, and saw that the scale had changed to 30000, and there was a quite impressive earthquake showing on it. I then started my PC shutdown procedure (it has a number of services and VMs running, so doesn’t shutdown quickly) as I was going to go home and check that Kathryn and the kids were ok. That’s when the building started shaking violently again. To me, that 1:04pm aftershock felt stronger, and I’ve since seen that it was a 5.7 centred much further West than the 6.3 under Lyttleton, so that would explain the more intense feeling in Addington. I went straight under the desk that time, and was again aroused once the shaking had subsided by someone telling me to leave the building. Both monitors had fallen over this time, and the one I stood up was showing nothing, so I presumed the shutdown had finished, but just then the power/lights flickered. I turned the computer off at the wall.

I took the remaining books off my bookshelf, and piled them with the ones that had already fallen on my desk, gathered up the house purchase offer, and put it in my satchel, which I took with me, checked that no one else was upstairs hiding/hurt/etc. checked the cafe for the same, where I moved some glass things that looked like they were about to drop off the fridge, checked no one was in the toilet, and went downstairs and outside.

There was a brief meeting where we were told we could go, and that traffic had already built up a lot. A workmate who lives near me asked me with tears in her eyes to check on her daughter on the way home, and that she’d had a txt from her, and that she was going to try and get a relative to go to her too.

No one else was after a ride towards St Martins, so I left in my car. Traffic was backed up on Princess St. to where I turn into the road, so I decided to go the less direct route, down Lyttelton St. Traffic appeared to be backed up that way too, and an unmarked cop car went racing off in that direction, so I waited and very soon was let in to join the traffic heading West on Blenheim Rd. I got to Matipo St, and turned South, crawling my way along Matipo St, Wrights Rd, gingerly driving under the Southern Motorway, and down Lyttelton St, noting the occasionally obvious fresh damage to houses, that became more obvious and common the further south I got.

Kids were out on the grass at West Spreydon School, and a number of people were arriving to collect their kids.

Where there had been liquifaction in September, Lyttelton St. was flooded on both sides, and completely covering the road in one small section. A car coming the other way demonstrated that the middle of the road wasn’t too deep.

The radio in the car was starting to report some very serious sounding news, but I can’t recall exactly what I heard at that time.

I turned onto Rose St. then down Fairview St. where I stopped briefly to check on friends. There was nobody there, so I continued on home, crossing the river and going along Cashmere Rd and Centaurus Rd, where there was more and more damage to the road surface, more flooding, and more silt bubbling up out of the ground and road. I turned down Albert Tce, and pulled up when I saw Kathryn sitting with the kids and some neighbours. I went and gave them a big hug.

I told Kathryn I’d promised to check on my workmate’s daughter, so we all got in my car, and we drove the short distance around to their place, but there was nobody there. I presumed a relative had been tracked down, and was looking after her, so we went back home. There were a lot of people in our street, and theirs seemed empty.

Kathryn said that our water had been turned off because the hot water cylinder had been leaking. I went to check the house - what a mess. Not from water - that only got one cupboard wet and then flowed out under the house. The mess was from violently shaking the kitchen, dining room, lounge, bedrooms, study, and garage. It seemed like if something was able to be pushed over by giving it a firm push, it was upside down on the floor, on top of broken glass. The kitchen had most of the pantry, fridge, and cupboard contents mixed together on the floor. The dining room had our buffet-hutch lying on top of a mountain of broken glass and precious crockery. The lounge had the TV, one of the tallboy speakers, the DVD bookcase, and the CD rack lying on the floor. The kid’s room had the tall dresser fallen on top of its drawers. Our bedroom had the same, with two dressers, and the light fitting was lying broken on the floor. The craft room had all the cupboards, drawers, and boxes emptied on the floor. The garage had preserved fruit smashed into the concrete floor. The study had a PC, large monitor, and drawers of stuff dropped on the floor. The house though appeared pretty much unchanged, with not much new visible damage (the minor damage throughout the house from “the first one” hadn’t gone away though). The night store heater completed its separation from the wall, pushing a chair into the wall as it did so.

I tried to send txts to Mum & Dad, and my sister, saying we were ok, but looking at my phone’s log now, it seems that I only succeeding in sending it to Mum & Dad.

We decided that Kathryn’s sister and family from a few doors down should stay with us till their house was checked, made weather-tight, and fit for living in, and we started cleaning up Kathryn’s craft room, trying to find and clear the floor so we could get beds out, up, down, etc.

We then righted furniture, replaced drawers, and started picking up broken glass and crockery. Our friends who had recently moved to Christchurch from Wellington had turned up, and helped tidy up too, till we sent them home to do some tidying at their place before it got dark.

That night the kids eventually fell asleep on our bed. I left them taking up the space I usually use, and I lay across the bottom of the bed, pulling my feet in with each aftershock as they were hanging out where the tall dresser had fallen against the bed earlier in the day.

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I'm not sure if what I can recall about the following days is worth publishing.