So this week has been pretty eventful…we’ve had earthquakes, severe weather warnings followed by flooding and storms as well as illness. It never rains, it pours. Literally.
As James has only been here since July last year, he hasn’t ever felt a big earthquake. We’ve had a few small shakes over the last few months, but nothing too scary. They were just quick shakes that had you wondering if there really had just been an earthquake, or whether it was just a big gust on wind or a truck driving past.
However, at 12.02 am Sunday night we had a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that shook us from our beds to the floor and had us sheltering for over a minute. The sound was immense; it sounded like the rumbling of a very large articulated lorry driving closely past the house. We know now that it was probably the sound of all of the huge logs stored at the port falling out of their cradles!
As we got up from the floor we heard James’s housemates asking if we were okay from the next room, so we all got up to check on each other. Michael, James’s Chilean housemate, who is more used to Earthquakes than we are, actually left the house during the earthquake and stood outside on the driveway!
Thankfully their house is pretty stable. I honestly didn’t think it was too bad initially, just very long. The house itself was pretty wobbly but it didn’t knock anything off of the walls or the windowsill, and all the taller items in the house remained upright. Amazingly the television remained on its precariously balanced unit!
James, Michael and myself went and stood upstairs in their living room for a short while and looked out of the window before moving back to the bedrooms, where James and I decided that it was probably a good idea to check on my house and my cats! So off we went to Lower Hutt, checking first to see if the roads would be okay to drive on, before packing a bag and setting off.
Wellington (and New Zealand in general) has a really great Civil Defence group that update people really well on anything that occurs to do with adverse weather, earthquakes and basically anything that will cause mass panic or wide spread damage and/or disruption. Their updates were a godsend when trying to figure out what was going on.
Like I said before, we really didn’t think that it was very bad…that was until we left the house and the WREMO (Wellington Region Emergency Management Office) reports started rolling in. By this time we were in Lower Hutt, at my house, and the Tsunami sirens began to sound!
When a Tsunami sirens sounds, if you live in a coastal area or in a flood plane, you’re supposed to get high up and wait for the Tsunami risk to go down. Thankfully, my house is really high up on the hillside and i didn’t need to leave my house.
When we got to my house, we found only a small amount of mess really, just books and picture frames having fallen, as well as a few glasses out of place. The only real damage was one of my picture frames lost a backing leg. I guess in the grand scheme of things I did very well!
The cats were pretty spooked, so we tried to keep them a little bit occupied so that they would (hopefully) be put a bit at ease with the whole thing. I don’t think it worked very well! Once we had sat down, it was only then that we realised that the earthquake was actually really bad. Videos an photographs had begun to be put up on Facebook and we were amazed that we had fared so well. For the rest of the evening we sat and listened to the radio and watched other peoples videos; I got absolutely no sleep at all!
In the morning, we turned on the television and discovered that Wellington was not the worst hit area; Kaikora was very badly hit. With earthquakes, it’s not just the magnitude that dictates how bad the effect will be, it’s also the depth and the distance from where you are. So the quake on Sunday was near to Kaikora and relatively shallow, therefore it hit badly. Being in Wellington, and far from the quake, we were hit with a quake that felt like a long rolling sensation.
Watching the news in the morning was quite shocking really, thousands of people have been displaced or cut off; Kaikora is a major tourist hub and is nearly doubled in size due to tourists. Almost all of the tourists are being evacuated to Lyttelton (the port near to Christchurch) on the HMNZS Canterbury, a huge military ship.
THEN, Tuesday, a lot of people were evacuated around Lower Hutt and the surrounding areas due to the Hutt River breaching its banks. Also the Waiwhetu stream was about three foot higher than it should have been and the houses nearest to it were evacuated. My work evacuated as well! Loads of evacuation.
The highway got so soggy that it closed down due to sheer amount of water and everyone not on the correct side of the harbour was stuck for the night! The highway is pretty much the only way out of the City, so it really goes to show how stuck we’d be if there really was a big earthquake!
To top it all off, i’ve been super sick this week!
Monday i felt exhausted, and no wonder at it, as I had zero sleep and all the stresses really just took their toll on me. This went on all week, it’s currently Thursday and I still feel like my body is falling apart and that my face might just fall off!
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